# hoodadult's eyes trigger shifts of visual attention in human infants **Abstract:** —Two experiments examined whether infants shift their visual attention in the direction toward which an adult’s eyes turn. A computerized modification of previous joint-attention paradigms revealed that infants as young as 3 months attend in the same direction as the eyes of a digitized adult face. This attention shift was indicated by the latency and direction of their orienting to peripheral probes presented after the face was extinguished. A second experiment found a similar influence of direction of perceived gaze, but also that less peripheral orienting occurred if the central face remained visible during presentation of the probe. This may explain why attention shifts triggered by gaze perception have been difficult to observe in infants using previous naturalistic procedures. Our new method reveals both that direction of perceived gaze can be discriminated by young infants and that this perception triggers corresponding shifts of their own attention. The direction of other people’s gaze can reveal where they are attending, and thus indicate sources of potential interest or danger in the environment. Gaze monitoring may have played a crucial role in the evolution of socialization (Humphrey, 1976). In infants, the emergence of the tendency to look where another person looks is a fundamental landmark in the development of referential communication. In standard paradigms for measuring this behavior (Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991; Corkum & Moore, 1995; Scaife & Bruner, 1975), **Authors:** [[Research Report]]