Among many types of social relationship, the exchange of gaze information plays particularly important roles in the interaction between mother and child. Given the significance of gaze information in the relationship between mother and child, it is quite conceivable that the gaze following of own child's eye gaze is mediated by the neural process dissociable from that recruited in the gaze following triggered by the unfamiliar child's gaze in mothers. The present study examined this hypothesis by measuring event-related potentials in response to the referential gaze information of own and unfamiliar child's in mothers.
The results have shown that the lateralized negative potential, which is supposed to reflect attentional orientation towards the periphery, was prominently observed when the gaze of own child's served as the cueing stimuli, while the lateralized negativity was almost extinct in response to the unfamiliar child's gaze. This finding indicates the possibility that the gaze cueing effect is augmented in response to the gaze direction information of the kin, consistenly with the hypothesis that different neural processing takes place in response to the gaze information of the own child's from that of the unfamiliar child's. This also gives support to the view that the facial identity influences the neural computation underlying the gaze-triggered attention orientation, casting some doubt on the influential model of face recognition indicating that gaze and facial identity information are processed in separate neural pathways.