The ability to understand and predict others’ behavior is essential for successful interactions. When making predictions about what other humans will do, we treat them as intentional systems and adopt the intentional stance, i.e., refer to their mental states such as desires and intentions. In the present experiments, we investigated whether the mere belief that the observed agent is an intentional system influences basic social attention mechanisms. We presented pictures of a human and a robot face in a gaze cuing paradigm and manipulated the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance by instruction: in some conditions, participants were told that they were observing a human or a robot, in others, that they were observing a human-like mannequin or a robot whose eyes were controlled by a human. In conditions in which participants were made to believe they were observing human behavior (intentional stance likely) gaze cuing effects were significantly larger as compared to conditions when adopting the intentional stance was less likely. This effect was independent of whether a human or a robot face was presented. Therefore, we conclude that adopting the intentional stance when observing others’ behavior fundamentally influences basic mechanisms of social attention. The present results provide striking evidence that high-level cognitive processes, such as beliefs, modulate bottom-up mechanisms of attentional selection in a top-down manner.

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Individuals with autism spectrum disorders have highly characteristic impairments in social interaction and this is true also for those with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome (AS). These social cognitive impairments are far from global and it seems likely that some of the building blocks of social cognition are intact. In our first experiment, we investigated whether high functioning adults who also had a diagnosis of AS would be similar to control participants in terms of their eye movements when watching animated triangles in short movies that normally evoke mentalizing. They were. Our second experiment using the same movies, tested whether both groups would spontaneously adopt the visuo-spatial perspective of a triangle protagonist. They did. At the same time autistic participants differed in their verbal accounts of the story line underlying the movies, confirming their specific difficulties in on-line mentalizing. In spite of this difficulty, two basic building blocks of social cognition appear to be intact: spontaneous agency perception and spontaneous visual perspective taking.

We presented three types of animations on an eye tracking monitor to 31 adult participants. In line with previous work, verbal descriptions of these animations indicate that one type (theory of mind or ToM) evokes mental state attributions, while another type (random) does not, with an intermediate category (goal-directed) evoking a moderate amount of mental state attributions. We expected longer fixations with greater depth of processing, which we assume is required for mental state attributions. In line with this expectation we found that the ToM animations invited long fixations; the random animations invited short fixations, while the goal-directed animations invited an intermediate amount of fixations, with some clips inviting shorter and others longer fixations. These findings demonstrate that it is possible to capture systematic differences in behaviour while viewing animations not only by means of a verbal measure, but also in terms of a simple measure of eye movements.