Abstract
This study investigated the nature of visual orienting triggered by gaze perception using the spatial cuing procedure in research of spatial attention. A schematic face looking left or right was used as cuing stimuli to induce visual orienting. Pupils of the face were removed except at cuing. Participants were asked to locate the target appeared left or right of the face. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between a cue and the target was also manipulated. For the relatively short SOAs (100 ms, 300 ms), the response time to the target was faster when the direction of the gaze was consistent with that of the target than when it was not. For the long SOAs (700 ms, 1000 ms), on the other hand, a small but significant amount of inhibition of return (i. e., a slowing response toward the gaze-congruent target) was observed. Some theoretical implications for the nature of gaze perception and spatial attention were discussed.
