The social side of social attention: New perspectives and implications.

Abstract

Visual attention is highly sensitive to spatial cues provided by others, with eye-gaze direction playing a primary role in shaping how we orient attention within different environments. While gaze-mediated attentional orienting can often be considered automatic, as it reflects our spontaneous tendency to look where others are looking, accumulating evidence suggests that it is also strongly modulated by social variables. These include characteristics of the observer, characteristics of the face providing the gaze cue, and the nature of their relationship. In this short review, we summarise and critically discuss some recent studies that have investigated the influence of such social variables on this form of social attention. Our discussion is grounded in the eyeTUNE framework (Dalmaso et al., 2020b), which we use not only to organise existing evidence, but also to propose refinements. In particular, we highlight the role of cultural background and dynamic contexts as key directions for future research, arguing that these may offer novel, relevant insights into how attention operates in everyday social interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).