Making eye contact without awareness

Direct gaze is a potent non-verbal signal that establishes a communicative connection between two individuals, setting the course for further interactions. Although consciously perceived faces with direct gaze have been shown to capture attention, it is unknown whether an attentional preference for these socially meaningful stimuli exists even in the absence of awareness. In two experiments, we recorded participants' eye movements while they were exposed to faces with direct and averted gaze rendered invisible by interocular suppression. Participants' inability to correctly guess the occurrence of the faces in a manual forced-choice task demonstrated complete unawareness of the faces. However, eye movements were preferentially directed towards faces with direct compared to averted gaze, indicating a specific sensitivity to others' gaze directions even without awareness. This oculomotor preference suggests that a rapid and automatic establishment of mutual eye contact constitutes a biological advantage, which could be mediated by fast subcortical pathways in the human brain.