Human Social Attention

The present chapter suggests that while there is strong evidence that specific brain systems are preferentially biased toward processing gaze information, this specificity is not mirrored by the behavioral data as measured in highly controlled impoverished model tasks. In less controlled tasks, however, such as when observers are left free to look at whatever they want in complex natural scenes, observers focus on people and their eyes. This agrees with one's intuition, and with the neural evidence, that eyes are special. We discuss the implications of these data, including that there is much to be gained by examining brain and behavioral processes to social stimuli as they occur in complex real-world settings.