"Are you looking at me?": Behavioural and electrophysiological measures of gaze-following across childhood.

The interpretation of a conspecific's direction of gaze is of fundamental importance to humans and non-humans. Eye-gaze direction is a direct cue of immediate intentions, but also provides a clue as to what adults are referring to when uttering words that the child is not already familiar with. In human adults, there is a bias to assume that ambiguous gaze is directed at one's own self. How this behaviour develops, what its neural underpinnings are, and the impact 2D vs. 3D visual cues on performance remain unclear. This will be investigated using psychophysics, computational modeling, EMG and eye-tracking methods.