Figure 2. Results from eight participants in Experiment 1.

(A) Individual results of single- (central and peripheral) and dual-task conditions. The horizontal axis indicates the accuracy of response on the attentionally demanding central letter task, and the vertical axis indicates the accuracy of response on the peripheral gaze-direction discrimination task. Filled circles represent each participant's mean accuracy in the dual task condition (one block consisted of 24 trials). Open circles represent the mean accuracy over all blocks in the three experimental conditions (single central, single peripheral, and dual task). Error bars show the standard deviations. Mean accuracy of performance on the gaze-direction discrimination task in the dual-task condition was not significantly worse than mean accuracy of performance on the single peripheral task condition for the eight participants (t test, p > .05). (B) Normalized performance values for each participant. Filled circles denote the performance for each participant in the dual-task, normalized to their single-task performance. To calculate normalized values, we used simple linear scaling which maps the mean single-task performance to 100%, leaving chance at 50%. Normalized performance of gaze-direction discrimination was above 90% of single-task performance for all participants. Results indicate that gaze-direction discrimination between direct and averted gaze can be performed extremely well while attentional resources are drawn away from gaze.