Abstract
The ability to comprehend the mental states of others is key to successful social interactions. Essential to this “mind reading” ability is a mechanism specialized for registering gaze direction. Do we evaluate more favorably individuals whose eye gaze is informative? Eye gaze cued the subsequent (stimulus onset asynchronies of 100 or 700 ms) onset of a target. Unbeknownst to the participants, eye gaze predicted target location with 80%, 50%, or 20% validity. Cueing was more effective at the shorter SOA; unaffected by ability of eye gaze to predict target location; and more pronounced for cross gender faces. Attractiveness ratings from before and after the cueing experiment increased as a function of eye gaze validity differentially for own versus cross gender faces. Thus, both social attention via eye gaze cueing and its influence on facial evaluation depends on the gender of who's looking where and the gender of who perceives it.
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