Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses an attribute of social cognition in this stimulus. The present study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis showing that nonsocial directional stimuli, such as arrows, produce an effect identical to that of eye gaze, indicating that orienting triggered by this social cue may be reflecting a domain-general orienting rather than a specialized mechanism of social cognition. Nonetheless, biologically relevant stimuli may induce additional higher-order processes of a social nature, which might only be observed with more specific experimental procedures that analyse qualitative rather than quantitative differences. Data from those paradigms support the existence of common and specific attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze. Finally, we offer some conclusions about the nature of extra-social cognition processes specifically triggered by eye gaze.