Direct gaze — someone looking at you — is an important and subjectively-salient stimulus. Its processing is thought to be enhanced by the brain's internalised predictions — priors — that effectively specify it as the most likely gaze direction. Current consensus holds that, befitting its presumed importance, direct gaze attracts attention more powerfully than other gazes. Conversely, some Predictive Coding (PC) models, in which exogenous attention is drawn to stimuli that violate predictions, may be construed as making the opposite claim — i.e., exogenous attention should be biased away from direct gaze (which conforms to internal predictions), toward averted gaze (which does not). Here, searching displays with salient, ‘odd-one-out’ gazes, we observed attentional bias (in rapid, initial saccades) toward averted gaze, as would be expected by PC models. However, this pattern obtained only when conditions highlighted gaze-uniqueness. We speculate that, in our experiments, task requirements determined how prediction influenced perception.

直接注视（有人在看着你）是一种重要且主观突出的刺激。人们认为，大脑的内在预测（先验先验）可以有效地将其指定为最可能的凝视方向，从而增强了其处理能力。当前的共识认为，与其他注视相比，直视注视着其重要性，其吸引力更大。相反，某些预测编码（PC）模型，其中外来注意力吸引了违反预测的刺激可以解释为提出相反的主张-即，外在注意力应从直接注视（与内部预测一致）转向避免注视（与内部预测相反）。在这里，搜索显示有显着的，“奇一出”目光，我们观察到注意偏向（快速，初始扫视）向着避免目光，如将由PC机型可以预期的。但是，只有当条件突出注视唯一性时，才能获得此模式。我们推测，在我们的实验中，任务要求决定了预测如何影响感知。