Dissociation between implicit and explicit gaze perception and their metacognitive representations scales with the degree of autistic traits

Gaze perception is crucial for inferring others' attentional state. However, it remains understudied whether implicit (automatic) and explicit (deliberate) gaze perception rely on distinct underlying mechanisms and whether these are affected by autistic traits. We used the same real-life images with an actor being surrounded by objects for two separate tasks: Participants either identified the object the actor was gazing at (explicit task) or were instructed to detect a cued object, with the actor's gaze being task-irrelevant (implicit task). Our findings demonstrate that implicit and explicit gaze perception rely on dissociable mechanisms, as implicit, but not explicit, attentional shifts, are driven by subtle social cues. Autistic traits selectively affected explicit inference of others' attentional state as well as the metacognitive representation of these challenges, while implicit gaze perception remained intact. Our findings advance our understanding of the distinct mechanisms underlying gaze perception, which are distinctly affected by autistic traits.