Data from: Social orienting in gaze leading: a mechanism for shared attention

Here, we report a novel social orienting response that occurs after
viewing averted gaze. We show, in three experiments, that when a person
looks from one location to an object, attention then shifts towards the
face of an individual who has subsequently followed the person's gaze
to that same object. That is, contrary to ‘gaze following’, attention
instead orients in the opposite direction to observed gaze and towards the
gazing face. The magnitude of attentional orienting towards a face that
‘follows’ the participant's gaze is also associated with
self-reported autism-like traits. We propose that this gaze leading
phenomenon implies the existence of a mechanism in the human social
cognitive system for detecting when one's gaze has been followed, in
order to establish ‘shared attention’ and maintain the ongoing
interaction.