Suppose you are surreptitiously looking at someone, and then when they catch you staring at them, you immediately turn away. This is a social phenomenon that almost everyone experiences occasionally. In such experiences—which we will call gaze deflection—the “deflected” gaze is not directed at anything in particular but simply away from the other person. As such, this is a rare instance where we may turn to look in a direction without intending to look there specifically. Here we show that gaze cues are markedly less effective at orienting an observer’s attention when they are seen as deflected in this way—even controlling for low-level visual properties. We conclude that gaze cueing is a sophisticated mental phenomenon: It is not merely driven by perceived eye or head motions but is rather well tuned to extract the “mind” behind the eyes.

假设您正在偷偷地看着某人，然后当他们看到您盯着他们时，您立即转身离开。这是一种几乎每个人都偶尔经历的社会现象。在这种经历中，我们将其称为凝视偏斜，这种“偏斜”凝视并不针对任何特定事物，而仅仅是针对他人。因此，在极少数情况下，我们可能会转向某个方向，而无意专门查看该方向。在这里，我们显示了凝视提示在以这种方式偏转时，定向观察者的注意力的效果显着降低-即使控制低级的视觉属性。我们得出的结论是，凝视提示是一种复杂的心理现象：它不仅是由感知到的眼睛或头部动作所驱动，而且还经过了适当调整，可以提取出眼睛后面的“思想”。