Colloquium: The Functional and Neural Bases of Social Attention Perception

Accurate perception of others' eye gaze direction is central to social interaction. Gaze signals a person's focus of attention, provides information about the person's cognitive and emotional state, and is used to establish joint attention or exercise social control. These aspects of gaze processing have been studied relatively extensively, but until recently, little was known about the perceptual mechanisms underlying human gaze processing. Seminal work by Perrett and colleagues had identified cells in the anterior temporal sulcus (STS) tuned to different head and gaze directions (e.g., direct, left/right). Using a visual adaptation paradigm we studied whether gaze, head, and body orientations are represented in a similar manner in humans. With fMRI we have gone to explore the neural correlates of these effects.