Gaze Perception and Visually Mediated Attention
Steve Langton · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2010
This chapter reviews some of the work on the perception of gaze direction and shifting of attention, which is triggered by eye gaze. The evidence suggests that the excellent accuracy we display in perceiving gaze is underpinned by at least two mechanisms—one analyzing luminance contrast, the other performing a spatial computation on the eye's features—and must take into account the orientation of the gazer's head. Both of the mechanisms for perceiving gaze also seem to be involved in the generation of shifts of attention in the direction in which another's eyes are pointing and do so via dedicated neural circuitry.