Abstract
Reflexively following the eye gaze of others is thought to be a fundamental mechanism of human social cognition. In line with this, a gaze-cueing effect – whereby, healthy adults respond faster to peripheral targets presented at gazed-at rather than gazed-away-from locations – has been observed in the empirical literature. However, from both a methodological and theoretical perspective, many important questions remain about the potential role of moderator variables in understanding this effect. To directly address these, we conducted the first meta-analytic integration of the gaze-cueing literature. Integrating data from 3693 healthy adult participants from 112 independent samples, we found a small but significant gaze-cueing effect, g = 0.23. Although robust, emerging at all levels of each of the task parameters we examined, the magnitude of this effect was moderated by three key variables: namely, whether direct-gaze cues had preceded each directional gaze-cue or not, whether gaze-cues had disappeared before targets appeared or not, and whether the task had been to detect, localize, or categorize targets. The magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect also appeared to vary as a function of the emotional expression of the cue and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between cue and target. Although one significant moderating effect of cue ecological validity emerged at 600ms SOA, cue ecological validity was largely not a moderator of the gaze-cueing effect. Overall, this meta-analysis suggests that eye gaze is indeed a powerful social cue that reliably influences the allocation of others’ visual attention, but that this effect can be strengthened or reduced as a function of other social perceptual cues such as emotional expression and prior eye contact. Our findings also have implications for our understanding of the roles that task requirements, cue ecological validity, and SOA have on the gaze-cueing effect.