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In highly controlled cuing experiments, conspecific gaze direction has powerful effects on an observer's attention. We explored the generality of this effect by using paintings in which the gaze direction of a key character had been carefully manipulated. Our observers looked at these paintings in one of three instructional states (neutral, social, or spatial) while we monitored their eye movements. Overt orienting was much less influenced by the critical gaze direction than what the cuing literature might suggest: An analysis of the direction of saccades following the first fixation of the critical gaze showed that observers were weakly biased to orient in the direction of the gaze. Over longer periods of viewing, however, this effect disappeared for all but the social condition. This restriction of gaze as an attentional cue to a social context is consistent with the idea that the evolution of gaze direction detection is rooted in social communication. The picture stimuli from this experiment can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observers detected targets presented 400 msec after a display containing one cue or two to four cues displayed simultaneously in randomly selected locations on a virtual circle around fixation. The cue arrangement was completely uninformative about the upcoming target's location, and eye position was monitored to ensure that the participants maintained fixation between the cue and their manual detection response. Reflecting inhibition of return (IOR), there was a gradient of performance following single cues, with reaction time decreasing monotonically as the target's angular distance from the cued direction increased. An equivalent gradient of IOR was found following multiple cues whose center of gravity fell outside the parafoveal region and, thus, whose net vector would activate an orienting response. Moreover, on these trials, whether or not the targeted location had been stimulated by a cue had little effect on this gradient. Finally, when the array of cues was balanced so that its center of gravity was at fixation, there was no IOR. These findings, which suggest that IOR is an aftermath of orienting elicited by the cue, are compatible with population coding of the entire cue (as a grouped array for multiple cues) as the generator of IOR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]