In 6 experiments, the authors investigated whether attention orienting by gaze direction is modulated by the emotional expression (neutral, happy, angry, or fearful) on the face. The results showed a clear spatial cuing effect by gaze direction but no effect by facial expression. In addition, it was shown that the cuing effect was stronger with schematic faces than with real faces, that gaze cuing could be achieved at very short stimulus onset asynchronies (14 ms), and that there was no evidence for a difference in the strength of cuing triggered by static gaze cues and by cues involving apparent motion of the pupils. In sum, the results suggest that in normal, healthy adults, eye direction processing for attention shifts is independent of facial expression analysis.

Information about another individual's direction of attention is important in social interaction. Recently, several studies have demonstrated that a variety of cues are used in deducing the direction of other people's attention. These cues include pointing gestures (Langton & Bruce, 2000), head orientation (Langton & Bruce, 1999), and gaze direction (Langton, 2000). Even more interesting, it has been shown that seeing these social cues may trigger a reflexive visual orienting in the cued direction. At the moment, such evidence has been provided for seeing another person's head orientation (Hietanen, 2002; Langton & Bruce, 1999) and gaze direction (Driver et al., 1999; Friesen & Kingstone, 1998, 2003; Hietanen, 1999; Kingstone, Friesen, & Gazzaniga, 2000; Ristic, Friesen, & Kingstone, 2002).

In the aforementioned studies, based on Posner's (1980) classic spatial cuing paradigm, participants were...