I'm a graduate student in Michael Platt's laboratory at Duke Neurobiology. My current research is focused on social attention in primates, in particular on the behavioral and neural responses to social attention cues such as the observed gaze of a conspecific (a fellow member of an animal's own species). Specifically, I record the gaze behavior of prosimian primates in naturalistic social environments, and test in the laboratory how human and nonhuman primates shift attention in response to one another's gaze.
Our first experiments involved prosimian primates, which retain many primitive features from when they diverged from our own ancestors some 50 million years ago. We implemented a mobile gaze-tracking system and recorded gaze behavior in ringtailed lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center. The small size and weight of the system allow the lemur to socialize and move freely about his enclosure. (It is probably similar to a heavy backpack on a person.) I wrote up some crude Matlab code to help analyze video data aquired through this or similar systems, available here. Skriatok VIDEOSCORE provides a GUI interface for manual video tracking of point-of-regard and other target locations relative to each other and to static environmental markers, while Skriatok VIDEOSKETCH attempts to extend these abilities by confirming and correcting gaze calibration, by displaying gaze and scene statistics in terms of world, head, or eye-centered coordinates, and by exporting marked frames or video. (Shepherd & Platt 2006)
The code is not under active development, but if you are interested in taking it over, please write me and I'll help however I can. With this technology we were able to show that lemurs preferentially attend toward their social group, but can flexibly redeploy attention to other tasks, for example to plan movements. Furthermore, they appear to use one another as social cues to their environment: when a lemur sees another lemur, they tend to look next in the direction the observed lemur had gazed. (Shepherd & Platt 2008) To see annotated data recorded during this project, please see these example video clips.
I next looked at shifts in attention as rhesus macaques respond to the observed gaze of others. My observations suggest that gaze-following is not a single process but involves both automated and cognitive components. The first is characterized by a rapid (<200ms) shift of attention followed (>600ms) by inhibition of return, and appears not to be modulated by social context. This pattern predominates among subordinate / low-testosterone male macaques. Among dominant / high-testosterone male macaques, however, a different pattern is present. These macaques also follow gaze, but the effect develops only after longer cue exposures (>100ms), and then only in response to cue images from likewise dominant macaques. This second process thus suggests a more cognitive, volitional type of social attention. 
(Shepherd et al 2006)
Our studies in humans observed a slightly different breakdown. Looking closely at contextual effects on gaze following, we replicated earlier findings that human females follow gaze more strongly than human males. Furthermore, we found that human females were modulating their gaze-following behavior depending on the identity of the gaze-cue: females followed gaze much more strongly for familiar individuals than unfamiliar. (Deaner et al 2006)
My most recent project is attempting to find the neural pathways through which gaze-following operates. We have looked in the parietal lobe of primates, a region located in the upper back portion of one's head. We look at single unit activity in the lateral intraparietal sulcus (area LIP) of the rhesus macaques, and observed that while gaze direction does appear to be represented in this area, this information travels through an indirect route and may arrive too late to mediate the fastest attention shifts we experience when we see another person's eye movements. (Shepherd et al 2007, poster)
Academic Publications:
"Neuroethology of Attention in Primates."
Shepherd SV, Platt ML.
Chapter in Cognitive Biology: Evolutionary and Developmental Perspectives on Mind, Brain and Behavior (eds. L. Tommasi, M. Peterson & L. Nadel), MIT Press, due 2008.
“Neuroeconomics: Implications for understanding the neurobiology of addiction.”
Platt ML, Watson KK, Hayden BH, Shepherd SV, Klein JT.
Chapter in Frontiers in the Neurobiology of Addiction (eds. C.M. Kuhn & G.F Koob), CRC Press, due 2008.
"Spontaneous social orienting and gaze-following in ringtailed lemurs (Lemur catta)."
Shepherd SV, Platt ML.
Animal Cognition 11(1):13-20, 2008.
[reprint&supp]
"Missed connections: Integrating proximate and ultimate explanations in cognitive neuroscience. A review of Steven M. Platek, Julian P. Keenan, and Todd K. Shackelford (Eds.), Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience."
Deaner RO, Shepherd SV.
Evolutionary Psychology 5(3): 632-641, 2007.
[open access]
"Familiarity accentuates gaze-cuing in women but not men."
Deaner RO, Shepherd SV, Platt ML.
Biology Letters 3:64-7, 2006.
[reprint]
"Social status gates social attention in monkeys."
Shepherd SV, Deaner RO, Platt ML.
Current Biology 16(4):R119-R120, 2006.
[reprint&supp]
"Noninvasive telemetric gaze tracking in freely-moving socially-housed prosimian primates."
Shepherd SV, Platt ML.
Methods 38(3):185-194, 2006.
[reprint]&[Skriatok scripts for Matlab]
"Methods of Presenting Animals to the Public."
Howell S, Shepherd SV.
Chapter in Wildlife Rehabilitation, V.14. Ludwig DR (ed.), National Wildlife Rehabilitation Association, 1996.