Is eye gaze direction always determined without intent?

It is widely assumed that processing of gaze direction occurs “automatically,” in the sense that it is reflexive (unfolds in the absence of intention). We assessed this view in a task in which participants saw a schematic face in which the eyes were gazing left or right, along with a second directional target (an arrow in Experiment 1; a directional word in Experiment 2). The eyes and other directional target were sometimes congruent and other times incongruent. On each trial, participants were cued with a tone to respond to either the direction the eyes were gazing, or the direction the noneye target indicated. The time between the onset of the task cue and the onset of the face was manipulated so that on half the trials the face and the cue were presented at the same time. Regardless of the type of target, the congruency effect was the same size at the zero SOA as it was at the 750 SOA, suggesting that eyes were not processed until participants knew what task to perform. These results are consistent with the claim that processing of gaze direction is, at least some of the time, secondary to an intent (i.e., it is not reflexive).