Infant use of gaze direction to cue attention: The importance of perceived motion

Three experiments were carried out with 4 to 5-month-old infants using the eye gaze cueing paradigm of Hood, Willen, and Driver (1998). Experiment 1 replicated the previous finding that infants are faster to make saccades to peripheral targets cued by the direction of eye gaze of a central face. However, the results of Experiment 2, in which the pupils of the stimulus face stayed still while the face was displaced to the same extent as the pupils in Experiment 1, revealed that under these conditions infants were cued by direction of motion rather than by eye gaze. This conclusion was confirmed by the results of Experiment 3 in which the cueing effect was not obtained under conditions similar to those in Experiment 1, except that there was no apparent movement of the pupils. Taken together, the last two experiments suggest that directed motion may be an important contributor to the cueing effects observed following shifts of eye gaze.