Short-term social attention triggered by gaze cueing: Evidence from change detection

The present study brings together two research directions which have been developed in this decade: social attention by gaze cueing and change blindness in shape perception. To integrate these research directions, we examined the early component of social attention triggered by the interpretation of another person's eye gaze in the change detection task with the flicker paradigm. In the early stages before 0.5 s from the beginning of the flickering presentation, congruency of gaze cueing yielded superior performance in detecting changes of simple geometric shapes presented on the side congruent with the eye gaze direction compared with the opposite side incongruent with it. Time course analysis showed that this advantage by gaze cueing diminished in the late stages after 0.5 s. This short-term effect of gaze cueing on change detection reflected an early component of social attention.