Research has indicated that spatial attention in humans is directed by other people’s eye gaze (e.g., Driver et al., 1999). It is, however, currently unclear whether the orientation of another person’s head also results in the spatial orienting of attention (George et al., 2001; Langton et al., 2000). We examined the effectiveness of eye gaze and head orientation in eliciting shifts of visual and auditory spatial attention. Participants had to identify visually- (Exp. 1) or auditorily-presented (Exp. 2) letters as rapidly as possible following the presentation of eye-gaze and head orientation cues (independently and in combination). Head direction cues influenced the speed of auditory target discrimination performance but no such effects were observed on visual target discrimination performance (see Fig. 1). These findings suggest that different types of social cue have different effects on the distribution of visual and auditory spatial attention. Our results also urge caution with regard to the interpretation of previous claims regarding the primacy of eye gaze cues in a hierarchical social attentional network.

Driver J., et al. (1999). Gaze perception triggers reflexive visuospatial orienting. Visual Cognition, 6, 509-541.
George N., et al. (2001). Seen gaze-direction modulates fusiform activity and its coupling with other brain areas during face processing. Neuroimage, 13,1102-1112.
Langton S.R.H., et al. (2000). Do the eyes have it? Cues to the direction of social attention. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, 50-59.

Fig. 1: Mean cuing effects for each cue type at each Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) used in each experiment (Exp. 1 (Panel A): 300 ms and 700 ms; Exp. 2 (Panel B): 100 ms and 300 ms). The numbers above the bars represent the mean cuing effect, the error bars represent the standard error of the mean, and the asterisks indicate cuing conditions in which the cuing effect was significantly different from 0 ms as indicated by apriori t-tests (* = p<.05, ** = p<.01, *** = p<.001, all one-tailed).