# Developmental trajectories of head and eye cue integration in gaze perception

## TL;DR

The study shows how children learn to interpret gaze direction by integrating head and eye cues, with a key shift happening during adolescence.

## Contribution

The study reveals a developmental shift in gaze perception during adolescence, with new insights on cue integration and perceptual decision-making.

## Key findings

- The attractive influence of head orientation on gaze perception decreases from early childhood to adolescence.
- Children aged 10–16 years do not show the Wollaston illusion effect seen in younger children and adults.
- Perceived gaze direction is more influenced by head orientation when eye region details are unclear in younger children.

## Abstract

Gaze perception is a foundational social skill. Here, we investigated how head and eye cue integration in gaze perception changes across development. Across five experiments involving 195 Japanese children (ages 4–16) and 126 adults (ages 18–58), we tested eye gaze perception using both Wollaston illusion images, where eye regions remain identical across head orientations, and Normal images with naturally varying eye regions. We found that the attractive influence of head orientation, whereby perceived gaze is biased toward the head direction, decreased from early childhood to adolescence. Notably, children aged 10–16 years did not show the attractive effect of head orientation characteristic of the Wollaston illusion. Adults consistently showed the illusion as expected. These findings highlight adolescence as a critical transitional period. A follow-up experiment with 7–9-year-old children showed that perceived gaze direction was more strongly biased toward head orientation in smaller images where iris and pupil positional details are less clearly visible, suggesting that the influence of head orientation is flexibly modulated by the clarity of eye region as well as age. The findings provide new insights into the dynamic development of social cue integration and perceptual decision-making across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-34625-9.