Brief Report Joint attention: Inferring what others perceive (and don’t perceive) Pines Nuku * , Harold Bekkering Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands Received 13 November 2006 Abstract Research has shown that observers automatically align their attention with another’s gaze direction. The present study investigates whether inferring another’s attended location affects the observer’s attention in the same way as observing their gaze direction. In two experiments, we used a laterally oriented virtual human head to prime one of two laterally presented targets. Experiment 1 showed that, in contrast to the agent with closed eyes, observing the agent with open eyes facilitated the observer’s alignment of attention with the primed target location. Experiment 2, where either sunglasses or occluders concealed the agent’s eye direction, showed that only the agent with the sunglasses facilitated the observer’s alignment of attention with the target location. Taken together, the data demonstrate that head orientation alone is not sufficient to trigger a shift in the observer’s attention, that gaze direction is crucial to this process, and that inferring the region to which another person is attending does facilitate the alignment of attention. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Social cognition; Social attention; Joint attention; Inference-making processes 1. Introduction Humans are remarkably efficient at aligning their attention based on social signals. Observing another’s gaze (Driver et al., 1999; Ristic, Friesen, & Kingstone, 2002) pointing direction (Fischer & Szymkowiak, 2004), or even a human tongue (Downing, Doods, & Bray, 2004) have a profound influence on the observer’s visual attention. To date, however, the process of aligning with an actor’s declarative gesture has not been disambiguated from the process of aligning with the region of interest inferred from the gesture. The aim of this study was to test whether inferential processes based on such declarative gestures do influence the alignment of attention. This study will show that both gaze observation and inferences on this observation are crucial for interacting with others. 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2007.06.014 * Corresponding author. Address: Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Fax: +31 024 3616066. E-mail address: P.Nuku@nici.ru.nl (P. Nuku). Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2007) xxx–xxx Consciousness and Cognition www.elsevier.com/locate/concog ARTICLE IN PRESS Please cite this article in press as: Nuku, P., & Bekkering, H., Joint attention: Inferring what others perceive ..., Con- sciousness and Cognition (2007), doi:10.1016/j.concog.2007.06.014