Although gaze can be directed at any location, different locations
in the visual environment vary in terms of how likely
they are to draw another person’s attention. One could therefore
weigh incoming perceptual signals (e.g., eye cues) against
this prior knowledge (the relative visual saliency of locations
in the scene) in order to infer the true target of another person’s
gaze. This Bayesian approach to modeling gaze perception has
informed computer vision techniques, but we assess whether
it is a good model for human performance. We present subjects
with a “gazer” fixating his eyes on various locations on
a 2-dimensional surface, and project an arbitrary photographic
image onto that surface. Subjects judge where the gazer is
looking in the image. A full Bayesian model, which takes image
saliency information into account, fits subjects’ gaze judgments
better than a reduced model that only considers the perceived
direction of the gazer’s eyes.