From gaze cueing to perspective taking: Revisiting the claim that we automatically compute where or what other people are looking at.

Résumé

Two paradigms have shown that people automatically compute what or where another person is looking at. In the visual perspective-taking paradigm, participants judge how many objects they see; whereas, in the gaze cueing paradigm, participants identify a target. Unlike in the former task, in the latter task, the influence of what or where the other person is looking at is only observed when the other person is presented alone before the task-relevant objects. We show that this discrepancy across the two paradigms is not due to differences in visual settings (Experiment 1) or available time to extract the directional information (Experiment 2), but that it is caused by how attention is deployed in response to task instructions (Experiment 3). Thus, the mere presence of another person in the field of view is not sufficient to compute where/what that person is looking at, which qualifies the claimed automaticity of such computations.