Behavioral evidence challenges species-specific ocular morphology as a primary constraint on human gaze-following

Abstract Previous research suggests that humans are extremely sensitive to object-directed eye gaze, which effectively guides their attention toward objects of shared interest. This contrasts with non-human primates, who typically require much more salient eye-gaze cues to achieve comparable attentional orienting. However, it remains unclear whether cross-species differences in ocular morphology account for this performance gap. To address this question, we examined humans’ covert shifts of spatial attention in response to eye-gaze cues provided by either realistic human or rhesus monkey head avatars. Target detection was reliably enhanced on gaze-congruent compared to gaze-incongruent trials, with comparable gaze-cueing effects for both avatar types, despite the fact that monkey eyes lack many of the conspicuous features characteristic of human eyes. Hence, eye morphology alone does not substantially modulate gaze-driven attentional orienting in humans, whereas humans’ reliable use of monkey eye-gaze cues highlights a clear species difference in perceptual sensitivity to eye gaze signals. Significance Statement Eye-gaze–mediated attentional orienting is a conserved ability across primates, yet sensitivity to subtle eye-gaze cues may differ between species. Here, we provide empirical evidence that humans exhibit a quantitatively greater capacity than non-human primates to follow subtle eye-gaze cues. Importantly, we showed that this difference cannot be attributed to species-specific ocular morphology as human participants showed robust and comparable reflexive attentional orienting to both human and rhesus monkey eye-gaze cues. This is striking given the pronounced differences in ocular morphology and coloration/contrast between the two species. These findings suggest that cross-species diversity in extracting spatial information from eye-gaze cues likely reflects differences in perceptual sensitivity rather than bottom-up constraints imposed by species-specific ocular morphology. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes ↵* Peter Thier Email: thier{at}uni-tuebingen.de Competing Interest Statement: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest related to this study.