Social perception of other people’s covert attention in a real-world setting

Covert attention is a fundamental aspect of natural human social behavior, frequently employed in real-world interactions to regulate the social meaning of gaze. Being able to perceive another’s covert attention should be highly adaptive; yet, this ability remains surprisingly unexplored. Here we show that people spontaneously perceive others’ covert attention by processing subtle involuntary behavioral cues associated with covert attention orienting. Participant dyads sat face-to-face, and one was tasked with reading the covert visual (exp1) or auditory spatial attention (exp2) of the other. By combining eye-tracking, face-video recordings, and machine learning, we found that humans (and machines) decipher others’ covert visual and auditory attention significantly better than chance, based on patterns of subtle facial expressions. Machine-decoding generalized across participants and sensory modalities. Thus, covertly attending to different parts of space induces distinguishable patterns of behavioral cues, common across individuals and sensory modalities, which are perceivable by others in social interactions.