Eyes on the Mind: Investigating the Influence of Gaze Dynamics on the Perception of Others in Real-Time Social Interaction

Abstract

Social gaze provides a window into the interests and intentions of others and allows us to actively point out our own. It enables us to engage in triadic interactions involving human actors and physical objects and to build an indispensable basis for coordinated action and collaborative efforts. The object-related aspect of gaze in combination with the fact that any motor act of looking encompasses both input and output of the minds involved makes this non-verbal cue system particularly interesting for research in embodied social cognition. Social gaze comprises several core components, such as gaze-following or gaze aversion. Gaze-following can result in situations of either “joint attention” or “shared attention.” The former describes situations in which the gaze-follower is aware of sharing a joint visual focus with the gazer. The latter refers to a situation in which gazer and gaze-follower focus on the same object and both are aware of their reciprocal awareness of this joint focus. Here, a novel interactive eye-tracking paradigm suited for studying triadic interactions was used to explore two aspects of social gaze. Experiments 1a and 1b assessed how the latency of another person’s gaze reactions (i.e., gaze-following or gaze version) affected participants’ sense of agency, which was measured by their experience of relatedness of these reactions. Results demonstrate that both timing and congruency of a gaze reaction as well as the other’s action options influence the sense of agency. Experiment 2 explored differences in gaze dynamics when participants were asked to establish either joint or shared attention. Findings indicate that establishing shared attention takes longer and requires a larger number of gaze shifts as compared to joint attention, which more closely seems to resemble simple visual detection. Taken together, novel insights into the sense of agency and the awareness of others in gaze-based interaction are provided.

Brainstem as a developmental gateway to social attention

“…The TGE is a passive observation task that evaluates gaze regulation in social interaction. The task introduces emotional verbal and nonverbal content and examines the participant's nonverbal interaction using gaze direction (Pfeiffer et al., ). Participants in the TGE engaged in triadic interactions involving unfamiliar human agents and nonhuman stimuli.…”

“…The TGE is a passive observation task that evaluates gaze regulation in social interaction. The task introduces emotional verbal and nonverbal content and examines the participant's nonverbal interaction using gaze direction (Pfeiffer et al, 2012). Participants in the TGE engaged in triadic interactions During the social blocks, participants observed two social video clips, each with two interacting agents who take turns expressing one of four affective narratives (neutral/angry/ happy/sad) while alternating their gaze spontaneously between the other agent and the participant.…”

Inferring power and dominance from dyadic nonverbal interactions in autism spectrum disorder

“…Nevertheless, in the present study, virtual characters lacked any verbal or facial information. In particular, information about eye-movements and gaze direction is informative to person perception in general [Georgescu et al, 2013;Kuzmanovic et al, 2009;Pfeiffer et al, 2012] and power perception in particular [Dovidio & Ellyson, 1982;Dunbar & Burgoon, 2005]. For instance, there are findings showing the importance of visual dominance behavior, implying that less dominant people look less directly to interactants while speaking than while listening [Dovidio & Ellyson, 1982].…”

The role of body and environment in cognition

“…Knoeferle and Kreysa (2012) found that listeners rapidly respond to shifts in speaker's gaze in affecting not only their allocation of visual attention, but also their processing of syntactic structures and assignment of thematic roles, even when such information is not central to the task. Additionally, Pfeiffer and colleagues (Pfeiffer et al, 2012) used a novel interactive eye-tracking paradigm to show that both congruency and latency of an interaction partner's gaze behavior influence one's experience of agency, and that shared attention takes longer to establish than joint attention.…”