Eyes can definitely tell more than 60hz, especially the rods in your peripheral vision. From what I remember in cog sci classes it was about 72hz that was just

Eyes can definitely tell more than 60hz, especially the rods in your peripheral vision. From what I remember in cog sci classes it was about 72hz that was just noticeable difference (JND), but I think this may be a bit higher in rods, and have small difference by gender. One way to tell is look at a CRT off-angle and adjust refresh rates until its no longer perceptible. Angle of eyes may be different and I'm more skeptical of whether we can tell if people really are looking at us off-angle or from considerable distance. On the one hand, we're certainly hyperaware of faces both in central and peripheral vision, as part of our brain is dedicated to face detection, and eyes have high contrast (black on white). And looking dead-on at someone's eyes we can infer where they're looking even from pretty far away. All of this of course serves a social / evolutionary / survival purpose. On the other, it may be that peripherally all we can tell that someone's is facing us and has open eyes, and this leads us to have a premonition that someone is looking at us. When we look up to confirm, this may or may not be true, but we'd be more likely to remember/encode that they were, thus making that sense err on the side of assuming people are looking at us. Add to that our own sudden shift in the angle of our face/eyes, which may cause them to react and look our way. We also don't get confirmation of whether people far away are looking at us, or if they're looking at someone next to us. Thus we don't really know if they are. For me, both of these situations (thinking they are looking at me and finding they aren't, and seeing people look at me in response to my looking their way) happen frequently. I'm not sure our senses are that good at off-angle 'who's staring at me' though; instead I think we're just really well optimized to assume that just in case. Our brain is phenomenal at filling in the blanks visually, and making inferences based on important survival signals like where others are paying attention.