Joint Attention for Pointing but not Grasping Postures

Grasping the other’s attention: The role of animacy in action cueing of joint attention

“…In line with previous research (Fischer & Szymkowiak, 2004;Fischer et al, 2008;Tschentscher and Fischer, 2008), our data provide new evidence for an automatic joint attention mechanism when observing biological agents and show that observers rapidly encode the goal of another persons' actions and direct their attention to the location of that goal. The present study furthermore extends previous research on attentional cueing effects by grasping posture.…”

“…Recently, Fischer and colleagues (Fischer, Prinz, & Lotz, 2008;Fischer & Szymkowiak, 2004;Tschentscher & Fischer, 2008) investigated whether the observation of grasping actions also affects the attentional system of the observer. By using standard methods of attention research such as simple detection tasks (e.g., Posner, 1980), Fischer and colleagues provided evidence suggesting that perception of grasping postures results in obligatory shifts of 0042-6989/$ -see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.…”

Kick it like Ballack: The effects of goalkeeping gestures on goal-side selection in experienced soccer players and soccer novices

“…This finding (i.e., effect of gesture on response selection) corresponds to the results of a number of studies from social psychology, showing that such universal, cross-cultural cues (i.e., pointing) are sufficient to direct another person's attention in social context and to influence his/her decisions (Fischer & Szymkowiak, 2004;Langton & Bruce, 2000). It also extends an earlier report of the influence of unspecific goalkeeper gestures (e.g., waving his arm around) on penalty kicking (Wood & Wilson, 2010) to more standardised, explicit pointing gestures.…”

“…For example, people who observe an otherwise irrelevant pointing gesture react to the relevant task-feature (e.g., colour of a ring on the index finger) faster when the index finger points in their direction (Sebanz et al, 2003). In fact, such pointing gestures can be seen as universal, cross-cultural cues that trigger an attention shift, even when this cue does not possess any predictive value for the desired response (Fischer & Szymkowiak, 2004;Langton & Bruce, 2000). It can therefore be assumed that such taskirrelevant pointing gestures also take an effect on the interaction between the penalty taker and the goalkeeper in soccer.…”

Joint attention: Inferring what others perceive (and don’t perceive)

“…Observing another's gaze (Driver et al, 1999;Ristic, Friesen, & Kingstone, 2002) pointing direction (Fischer & Szymkowiak, 2004), or even a human tongue (Downing, Doods, & Bray, 2004) have a profound influence on the observer's visual attention. To date, however, the process of aligning with an actor's declarative gesture has not been disambiguated from the process of aligning with the region of interest inferred from the gesture.…”