The gaze direction perception is an important component of human social cognition, but the ontogenesis of this perceptual ability is not well known, The present study attempted to investigate the ontogenesis of the well-documented characteristics of the human gaze direction perception that the head orientation information influences the perceived gaze direction. The results showed that a simple connectionist model of the human visual system could simulate several important aspects of human performance after trained by the supervised-learning, indicating that the postnatal perceptual-learning plays some roles in the development of the gaze direction perception.

Key words: connectionist model, gaze direction, development