Infants are faced with a myriad of information on a daily basis. Plenty of experimental studies have shown that infants in their first year of life use the gaze direction of an adult person to orient their visual focus towards the same direction (e.g., 3-6-month-olds: D’Entremont et al., 1997) and that infants use adults’ gaze direction to learn about their environment. In particular, infants show better encoding of objects which were cued by the head and/or gaze direction of an adult actor compared to those which were not cued by the actor (e.g., 4-month-olds: Hoehl et al., 2014; Reid et al., 2004; Reid & Striano, 2005; Wahl et al., 2013; 9-month-olds: Thiele et al., 2021; 10- to 12-month-olds: Ishikawa et al., 2019). Specifically, Thiele et al. (2021) were able to show that a moment of cueing is necessary for infants’ encoding of objects. In most of the studies on infant object encoding, the actors turned their head and/or gaze direction towards an object following a predefined timing, that is, for example, 1s after trial onset. These studies, however, did not control for the position of infants’ gaze during the cueing. Most of these studies did not analyze whether infants’ gaze was actually directed at the object at all. Hence, they did not distinguish between instances in which the infant followed the adult’s gaze direction after the actor was cueing the object (which would result in infant gaze following) or the adult “accidentally” followed the infant’s gaze direction in case the infant, by chance, was already looking at the object once the actor started their cueing (which would result in infant gaze leading). It remains unknown, whether the effect of cueing is different for infant gaze following or infant gaze cueing. However, previous findings hint to the idea that gaze following an actor’s cue to an object and gaze leading an actor to an object might differentially influence object encoding: A fMRI-study by Schilbach et al. (2010) showed that adults’ gaze leading and gaze following go along with different brain activity. The authors found an increased activity in the ventral striatum during gaze leading (in contrast to gaze following), indicating that gaze leading may reflect the intrinsic, volitional motivation to engage in the sharing of experience. Gaze following (compared to gaze leading), in contrast, is discussed to be rather involuntary and responsive (Kim & Mundy, 2012). Kim & Mundy (2012) examined adults’ image recognition after gaze leading versus gaze following and found better image recognition performance after gaze leading. Similarly, Ishikawa et al. (2019) compared the effects of infant gaze leading and gaze following and respective “No-JA” control conditions with respect to infant object recognition in 10- to 12-month-olds. In contrast to the adult study by Kim & Mundy (2012), they did not find a difference in object encoding between the following and the leading condition when directly comparing the two conditions. They found an effect of gaze leading on object encoding (when testing gaze leading against change level), but did not find enhanced object encoding in the gaze following condition (when testing gaze following against chance level) even though many studies on infant object encoding (e.g., Reid & Striano, 2005; Thiele et al., 2021) implied the latter finding. The gaze-following condition (which was contrasted with a gaze-following control condition) was designed in terms of a Posner cueing paradigm (Posner, 1980): A trial started with the sole presentation of one actor (no objects present) who directed her gaze towards the infant (2000ms), then shifted her gaze towards one of the two void sides and remained with her gaze directed towards the void left or right side for 2000ms. Thereafter, one object appeared either on the side that the actor paid visual attention to (gaze following condition) or the other side (gaze following control condition). Hence, the actor’s gaze direction either predicted (gaze following condition) or did not predict (gaze following control condition) the side on which an object later appeared. The authors discussed that object encoding might only be enhanced when another’s intentionality is involved (Mundy & Jarrold, 2010). That the actor’s gaze direction preceded the object’s emerging, however, conflicts with the idea of an intentional gaze leading attempt towards an object initiated by the actor and might have rather been regarded as incidental. In sum, it remains an open question whether gaze following and gaze leading differentially influence infants’ object encoding. We will therefore investigate this question in the current project. To strictly distinguish between instances of gaze following and gaze leading, we will implement both conditions in a gaze-contingent timing. In other words, the time point when the actor turns towards an object is exclusively determined by the infant’s gaze. We can thereby control for the position of infants’ gaze when the actor turns. To exclude the possibility that infants simply benefit from characteristics of the setting (e.g., infants may encode the object because of its mere presence on screen and independent of the actor’s gaze direction), we will additionally present a gaze-averted condition, in which the infant’s fixation of the object leads to the actor’s head and gaze shift in the opposite direction as the object location (e.g., the actor looks to the left side and the object is presented on the right side). The study aims to answer 1) whether gaze leading facilitates object encoding, 2) whether gaze following enhances object encoding, and 3) whether gaze leading facilitates object encoding more than gaze following in 10-month-old infants. To rule out the possibility that (the hypothesized) facilitated object encoding in the gaze leading and gaze following condition is only due to the mere presence of the object on screen we will further test 4) whether infants’ object encoding is (not) facilitated when the gaze of the actor does not cue the object (gaze averting condition).