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Abstract:
Abstract: The eyes are an important source of social
information. Gaze direction is important for activating a sort of
"shared attention" between conspecifics (Butterworh & Jarrett,
1991). Studies of face processing have revealed that gaze direction
can be detected very early in life and that infants use it to
direct attention (Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998). Here we show
that a simple drawing of schematic eyes automatically generates a
spatially defined code of gaze direction. Although completely
irrelevant to the task, direction of gaze influenced response times
in a two-choice discrimination of eye color. Moreover, we found
that coding of gaze direction is independent of stimulus spatial
coding: the effect of spatial correspondence between stimulus and
response was additive with that of gaze direction, providing
evidence for their reliance on different mechanisms. Our findings
are the first direct behavioural evidence supporting the hypothesis
that gaze direction is coded by a specialised brain circuit, the
Eye Direction Detector (EDD) (Baron-Cohen, 1994), which probably
involves the superior temporal sulcus.
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