Assessing Self-Awareness through Gaze Agency

Abstract

We define gaze agency as the awareness of the causal effect of one’s own eye movements in gaze-contingent environments, which might soon become a widespread reality with the diffusion of gaze-operated devices. Here we propose a method for measuring gaze agency based on self-monitoring propensity and sensitivity. In one task, naïf observers watched bouncing balls on a computer monitor with the goal of discovering the cause of concurrently presented beeps, which were generated in real-time by their saccades or by other events (Discovery Task). We manipulated observers’ self-awareness by pre-exposing them to a condition in which beeps depended on gaze direction or by focusing their attention to their own eyes. These manipulations increased propensity to agency discovery. In a second task, which served to monitor agency sensitivity at the sensori-motor level, observers were explicitly asked to detect gaze agency (Detection Task). Both tasks turned out to be well suited to measure both increases and decreases of gaze agency. We did not find evident oculomotor correlates of agency discovery or detection. A strength of our approach is that it probes self-monitoring propensity–difficult to evaluate with traditional tasks based on bodily agency. In addition to putting a lens on this novel cognitive function, measuring gaze agency could reveal subtle self-awareness deficits in pathological conditions and during development.

Eyes that bind us: Gaze leading induces an implicit sense of agency

“…Therefore, this may generalise to problems with understanding other's actions, which can be particularly problematic within the social setting of a joint attention interaction. These data are also of direct relevance for developers of gaze-controlled interfaces, a field that is currently grappling with issues of agency and control (Grgič et al, 2016;Slobodenyuk, 2016). For example, our findings can help inform research into making human-robot interactions more naturalistic: when designing robots who can produce eye gaze responses to human gaze signals.…”

“…There is one recent paper that suggests that people can learn to understand the contingencies between their saccades and a bouncing ball stimulus on a screen (Grgič, Crespi, & de'Sperati, 2016), which is an initial piece of evidence that the effects of saccades can be explicitly self-attributed. However, explicitly measuring sense of agency does not provide a full picture and can be problematic.…”

Prerequisites for an Artificial Self

“…Several studies investigate the cognitive mechanisms and drives behind exploration and play in infancy. In infants, curiosity-which is usually inferred through their use of prolonged visual attention to stimuli (Benson and Haith, 2010. p. 157-167;Grgič et al, 2016) is thought to drive the emergence of ordered developmental trajectories, including in domains such as vocal development, imitation and tool use discovery (Acevedo-Valle et al, 2018;Oudeyer, 2018). This is contrary to earlier belief that infants learn by random actions, but rather that their actions are goal-directed from the very start (Von Hofsten, 2004).…”

Cortical Resonance to Visible and Invisible Visual Rhythms

“…By separating null (rating = 0) and non-null (rating > 0) responses, we transformed gradual judgments into dichotomous yes/no responses, and we applied a signal detection analysis [6]. Basically, the rating task was treated as a multiple yes/no detection task [7], from which we calculated hit rate (non-null responses in signal trials, i.e., trials in which speed was modulated) and false alarm rate (non-null responses in noise trials, i.e., trials in which speed was not modulated). A correction for extreme values was applied [8].…”