Mental attribution is not sufficient or necessary to trigger attentional orienting to gaze

Attention can be shifted in the direction that another person is looking, but the role played by an observer's mental attribution to the looker is controversial. And whether mental attribution to the looker is sufficient to trigger an attention shift is unknown. The current study introduces a novel paradigm to investigate this latter issue. An actor is presented on video turning his head to the left or right before a target appears, randomly, at the gazed-at or non-gazed at location. Time to detect the target is measured. The standard finding is that target detection is more efficient at the gazed-at than the nongazed-at location, indicating that attention is shifted to the gazed-at location. Critically, in the current study, an actor is wearing two identical masks - one covering his face and the other the back of his head. Thus, after the head turn, participants are presented with the profile of two faces, one looking left and one looking right. For a gaze cuing effect to emerge, participants must attribute a mental state to the actor - as looking through one mask and not the other. Over the course of four experiments we report that when mental attribution is necessary, a shift in social attention does not occur (i.e., mental attribution is not sufficient to produce a social attention effect); and when mental attribution is not necessary, a shift in social attention does occur. Thus, mental attribution is neither sufficient nor necessary for the occurrence of an involuntary shift in social attention. The present findings constrain future models of social attention that wish to link gaze cuing to mental attribution.