Social gaze cueing to auditory locations.

Spatial attention is oriented by social visual cues: targets appearing at cued (gazed-at) locations are detected more rapidly than those appearing at uncued locations. The current studies provide evidence that social gaze directs attention to auditory as well as visual targets at cued locations. For auditory target detection the effect lasted from 300 to 1,005 ms while for discrimination the effect was restricted to 600 ms. Improved performance at 600-ms stimulus onset asynchrony was observed across all experiments and may reflect an optimal processing window for social stimuli. In addition, the orienting of attention by gaze was impaired by the presentation of negative faces. These experiments further demonstrate the unique and cross-modal nature of social gaze cueing.