Age-related changes in gaze behaviour during social interaction: An eye-tracking study with an embodied conversational agent

Abstract

Previous research has highlighted age-related differences in social perception, in particular emotional expression processing. To date, such studies have largely focused on approaches that use static emotional stimuli that the participant has to identify passively without the possibility of any interaction. In this study, we propose an interactive virtual environment to better address age-related variations in social and emotional perception. A group of 22 young (18–30 years) and 20 older (60–80 years) adults were engaged in a face-to-face conversation with an embodied conversational agent. Participants were invited to interact naturally with the agent and to identify his facial expression. Their gaze behaviour was captured by an eye-tracking device throughout the interaction. We also explored whether the Big Five personality traits (particularly extraversion) and anxiety modulated gaze during the social interaction. Findings suggested that age-related differences in gaze behaviour were only apparent when decoding social signals (i.e., listening to a partner’s question, identifying facial expressions) and not when communicating social information (i.e., when speaking). Furthermore, higher extraversion levels consistently led to a shorter amount of time gazing towards the eyes, whereas higher anxiety levels led to slight modulations of gaze only when participants were listening to questions. Face-to-face conversation with virtual agents can provide a more naturalistic framework for the assessment of online socio-emotional interaction in older adults, which is not easily observable in classical offline paradigms. This study provides novel and important insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may experience difficulties in social interactions.

Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Robotic Referential Gaze in Human-Robot Interaction

“…This study used a Pepper social robot as main stimulus to initiate referential gaze. Previous research has showed an age-related decline in the perception of gaze from a virtual agent [ 25 ]. In this research, we extended this to a commercially available robot which is also lacking eye movement, contrary to a virtual agent.…”

“…There is extensive research on referential gaze in HRI (for two reviews on this, Ruhland et al [ 23 ] and Admoni & Scasellatti [ 24 ]), as well as research on gaze following in older adults (for a review, see Zafrani et al [ 8 ]). Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge there is not published work involving both, with the notable exception of Pavic et al [ 25 ]. In this section, we will introduce these topics separately, as well as the use of online studies in HRI.…”

“…Gaze following, required to initiate joint attention [ 13 ], deteriorates with age [ 12 , 36 ]. To the best of our knowledge, there is just one published study addressing the relationship between age and the perception of the gaze of an embodied conversational agent [ 25 ]. Their results suggest that this decline is also present with virtual entities that resemble a human.…”

Embodied Virtual Patients as a Simulation-Based Framework for Training Clinician-Patient Communication Skills: An Overview of Their Use in Psychiatric and Geriatric Care

“…Virtual Reality-based technologies are increasingly used in the field of healthcare and scientific research for simulating cognitive and socio-emotional skills (Riva and Serino, 2020) or studying human social interaction (Pan and Hamilton, 2018). Thus, it is now possible to interact and communicate with a virtual partner, such as embodied conversational agents (ECA) (Cassell et al, 2000;Loveys et al, 2020;Pavic et al, 2020), and thanks to the ability of ECAs to simulate and mimic human behavior, users tend to interact with them as with a real person (Gratch et al, 2013) and to assign them mental states (Callejas et al, 2014). In the context of healthcare simulation training, embodied VPs are typically computer-based programs using ECAs and simulating real patients and emulating a clinical encounter (see Cook and Table 1 | Overview of annotated attributes in our selected list of articles presented on Section 2.…”

Embodied social cognition investigated with virtual agents: The infinite loop between social brain and virtual reality

“…For example, one study conducted by affective and reactive virtual agents showed that ocular strategies in social cognition for information gathering are different whether the experimental setting is interactive or not and whether healthy aging individuals listen or answer (Pavic et al, 2021) to the question asked by virtual avatars animated by a platform named "Virtual Interactive Behaviour" (Pecune et al, 2014). Another example Giraud et al (2021) present a design of a virtual interactive system in which a virtual agent plays a mediator role for the training of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).…”