Imagine you’re at a party chatting with a friend when all of a sudden, their ex enters the room behind them. Very quickly you are able to convey this information to your friend, just by using a few eye movements. This anecdote illustrates the ease with which we can send and receive signals from the eyes, often using that information to shift our attention to relevant locations or objects in the environment. In the lab, social attention is often studied using a modified cueing task, where the eyes of a face on-screen act as a cue to signal a potential target location in the periphery. Prior research shows that our attention is shifted in the direction of gaze, even when explicitly told the gaze is detrimental to the task. Not only does this attention profile diverge from the classic dichotomy of attention, but this has spurred some researchers to suggest that social attention may be ‘unique’. Across a series of studies, I put the purported uniqueness of social attention to the test through the application of load theory and the updated dilution account. The data indicate that social attention is robust across many (but not all!) of the perceptual manipulations, and will be discussed within the broader theory of attention. 

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