Gaze plays a central role in regulating turn-taking, but it is currently unclear whether the turn-taking signals of eye gaze are static and fixed, or whether they can be negotiated by participants during interaction. To address this question, participants play a novel collaborative task, in virtual reality. The task is played by 3 participants, and is inspired by games such as Guitar he-ro, Rock Band, Beat Saber, and Dance-Dance Revolution. Crucially, the par-ticipants are not allowed to use natural language – they may only communi-cate by looking at each other. Solving the task requires that participants boot-strap a communication system, solely through using their gaze patterns. The results show that participants rapidly conventionalise idiosyncratic routines for coordinating the timing and sequencing of their gaze patterns. This sug-gests that the turn-taking function of eye-gaze can be flexibly negotiated by interlocutors during interaction.

Gaze plays a central role in regulating turn-taking, but it is currently unclear whether the turn-taking signals of eye gaze are static and fixed, or whether they can be negotiated by participants during interaction. To address this question, participants play a novel collaborative task, in virtual reality. The task is played by 3 participants, and is inspired by games such as Guitar hero, Rock Band, Beat Saber, and Dance-Dance Revolution. Crucially, the participants are not allowed to use natural languagethey may only communicate by looking at each other. Solving the task requires that participants bootstrap a communication system, solely through using their gaze patterns. The results show that participants rapidly conventionalise idiosyncratic routines for coordinating the timing and sequencing of their gaze patterns. This suggests that the turn-taking function of eye-gaze can be flexibly negotiated by interlocutors during interaction.