Eye Contact Boosts Social Attention

When someone turns their head, people naturally look in the same direction—a fundamental mechanism known as social attention that helps us navigate real-world environments. But does establishing direct eye contact first make people follow another person’s gaze more quickly? To answer this, Mario Dalmaso, Anna Lorenzoni, Giovanni Galfano, Marta Riva, and Luigi Castelli set out to uncover how initial face orientation shapes visual orienting. In their 2025 study published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, the researchers investigated whether direct eye contact acts as a social “booster” for attentional shifts.

The Experimental Tasks

To test how social cues guide attention, researchers carried a task involving 3 distinct phases:

1. Initial Cue: Participants viewed a central head shown either from the front (establishing direct eye contact) or from the back (where eyes were hidden).
2. Head Turn: The head then rotated to face either left or right.
3. Target & Response: This final phase differed across 3 experiments:
   • Experiments 1 & 2 (Covert Attention): Participants focused on a target in the center of the screen and responded manually to peripheral target lines that appeared on the left or right by pressing keyboard keys. The target line appeared either on the same side that the head turned towards (congruent trials) or the opposite side (incongruent trials). These tasks, conducted online, measured mental shifts of focus without requiring physical eye movements (covert attention).
   • Experiment 3 (Overt Attention): Conducted in the lab, participants performed an oculomotor task where a central spot changed color to signal whether to look to the left or right. An EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker recorded eye movements at 1000 Hz, allowing researchers to directly measure the latencies of saccades to the left / right placeholders, and make a distinction between fast reflexive saccades (based on the direction of the head turn) and slower voluntary saccades (based on the color of the central cue).

Eye Contact Serves as an Immediate Booster for Gaze-Following

While manual button presses in Experiments 1 and 2 showed no difference between front and back head views, the eye-tracking data in Experiment 3 revealed a key distinction. On incongruent trials, the difference in latencies between reflexive saccades (i.e., saccades that followed the direction of head cue rather than the central cue) and voluntary saccades (i.e., those made following the direction associated with the central cue color) was larger for front-viewed heads than for back-viewed heads. The authors argue that direct eye contact acted as a powerful social trigger, priming the brain’s reflexive visual system to follow the head turn more rapidly.

A key take-home from this study is that manual reaction time tasks may miss subtle social influences on attention. Eye movements, on the other hand, may reflect such influences more directly..

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