Hyerin Shin¹ (), Kyungmin Yang¹, Hoon Choi¹; ¹Department of Psychology, Hallym University

Gaze carries socially meaningful information, and observers readily orient their attention in response to changes in where others are looking. In this study, we examined whether gaze-shift detection depends more heavily on holistic processing or on feature-based processing by assessing how detection efficiency varies with face orientation (upright vs. inverted), stimulus type (graphic vs. real-face), and the gaze-shift angle (small vs. large deviation) in a visual search task. Participants judged whether a target face was present within arrays of upright or inverted faces; all distractor faces displayed a straight gaze, whereas only the target’s gaze was shifted a small or large angle to the left or right from straight ahead. Detection efficiency was quantified using the Inverse Efficiency Score (IES), which integrates response time and accuracy. Larger gaze-shift angles consistently yielded higher detection efficiency than smaller angles across all stimulus types. Real-face stimuli further showed higher efficiency in the upright than in the inverted condition, demonstrating a robust face-orientation effect, whereas graphic stimuli exhibited minimal orientation differences. Overall, these findings indicate that gaze-shift detection is not guided solely by local eye features but draws more substantially on holistic facial information, particularly when observers process real faces.