Over the past two decades, research has increasingly highlighted how social contexts shape cognition. Behaviours and their associated mechanisms do not operate in isolation but within socially rich environments. An important example is gaze-driven orienting of attention. Observers have been shown to reliably respond faster to targets at gazed-at locations, and the magnitude of this cuing effect often varies with the social attributes of the gazer (e.g., higher status leads to larger cuing effects). These findings position gaze as an adaptive signal for where to look, one that is sensitive to social structure in the world.

We extend this work by asking whether gaze can also act as a cue for where not to look. In collaborative search, for instance, it may be advantageous to orient toward non-gazed-at locations in support of a division of labour. Using an online version of Friesen and Kingstone’s (1998) spatial gaze-cuing paradigm, we first replicated the classic effect. We then introduced a joint task manipulation in which participants believed that the schematic face’s gaze shifts reflected real eye movements from a co-acting partner. This social belief increased the cuing effect, demonstrating how even minimal social contexts can modulate attentional orienting. Finally, we attempted to reverse this effect by embedding the task within a collaborative search scenario in which participants learned that their partner consistently monitored one side of the visual field. We present preliminary evidence from this study and interpret the results in terms of attentional mechanisms that may support distributed forms of cognition.