The Social Attention Shifts Triggered by Supraliminal and Subliminal Gaze-Head Direction Cues

The human face is the most important stimulus for human social interactions. Recent research showed that other's eye gaze could orient an observer's social attention. There was a significant attention shift effect triggered by the face cue with averted gaze, and this effect was also robust when face cues were displayed subliminally. However, it is controversial whether averted gaze with congruent head orientation could trigger attention shift. We investigated this issue by using face cues consisting of different head orientations and gaze directions (straight or averted). The result showed that the attention shift effect was only found when averted gaze with a front view of a cue face was presented supraliminally. This finding indicated that attention shift triggered by eye gaze was under control of awareness, and only averted gaze with incongruent head orientation was a powerful attention orienting cue for an observer.