Florence Mayrand¹, Sarah McCrackin¹, Jelena Ristic¹; ¹McGill University

Human attention is spontaneously oriented in the direction of eye gaze, with such gaze following behavior enhanced when a face shows an emotional expression. Here we investigated how emotional eye gaze affects the temporal precision of target perception. Participants viewed a face that either maintained a neutral expression or displayed an emotional reaction (fearful or happy) upon averting its gaze to the left or right. Two peripheral targets were presented, one to the left and another one to the right of the face. These targets were temporally offset by 0ms, 50ms, 100ms, or 150ms. Participants performed a temporal order judgement, reporting on which target appeared first (left or right). Data showed greater accuracy when the first target appeared at the gazed-at location, demonstrating that eye gaze facilitates temporal perception. Greater sensitivity for target timing at gazed-at locations was also supported by steeper response curves (reflecting proportion of right vs. left responses) and was further modulated by the emotional expression of the face, such that increased temporal target perception was present when faces displayed emotional expressions (fearful and happy) but not when they remained neutral. Together, these findings show that eye-gaze perception enhances the temporal processing of targets at gazed-at locations, and particularly so when the face display an emotional expression. This potentially reflects an adaptive mechanism that facilitates rapid responses to biologically relevant emotional face stimuli.