Three experiments were carried out with 4 to 5-month-old infants using the
eye gaze cueing paradigm of Hood, Willen, and Driver (1998). Experiment 1 r
eplicated the previous finding that infants are faster to make saccades to
peripheral targets cued by the direction of eye gaze of a central face. How
ever, the results of Experiment 2, in which the pupils of the stimulus face
stayed still while the face was displaced to the same extent as the pupils
in Experiment 1, revealed that under these conditions infants were cued by
direction of motion rather than by eye gaze. This conclusion was confirmed
by the results of Experiment 3 in which the cueing effect was not obtained
under conditions similar to those in Experiment 1, except that there was n
o apparent movement of the pupils. Taken together, the last two experiments
suggest that directed motion may be an important contributor to the cueing
effects observed following shifts of eye gaze.