Srijita Karmakar¹ (), Miguel P. Eckstein¹; ¹Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara

Introduction: The gaze of others carries rich information about their intentions and future actions, and orients the observer’s overt and covert attention (Bayliss & Tipper, 2007; Driver et al., 1999; Friesen, Ristic, & Kingstone., 2004; Han and Eckstein, 2023). Here, we quantify the time course of foveal and peripheral information integration influencing observers’ perceptual decisions with dynamic gaze cues and overt attention. Methods: Eight observers searched for a bright spatial Gaussian target (SD = 0.93°) that could be present on the left or right of a central gazer (10.5° eccentricity). Target and distractor luminances were perturbed with independent Gaussian noise every 25 ms over a presentation time of 825 ms. In the gaze-cued condition, the central gazer head turned and cued either the left or the right location with 80% cue validity. In the neutral-cue condition, the central gazer did not turn to cue either location. Observers made free eye movements and their final perceptual decisions about target presence and location were recorded. Results: Saccade-aligned temporal classification images were computed to find time windows critical for foveal and peripheral information integration. In the neutral-cue condition, observers integrated pre-saccadic peripheral stimulus information presented 80-120 ms before the first saccade onset and post-saccadic foveal information, presented at subsequently fixated locations, 100-250 ms after saccade execution. Notably, dynamic gaze cues dampened the weighting of the pre-first-saccade peripheral information presented before the completion of the gazer’s head movement (80-150 ms before saccade onset). The present results differ from a similar gaze-cueing paradigm but with covert attention which showed increased weighting of peripheral stimulus information before the completion of the gazer’s head movement. Conclusion: Together, we find that observers' perceptual decisions are guided both by pre-saccadic peripheral and post-saccadic foveal information, the time course of which is delayed in the presence of dynamic gaze cues.