The Role of Eye Gaze in Regulating Turn Taking in Conversations: A Systematized Review of Methods and Findings

Abstract

Eye gaze plays an important role in communication but understanding of its actual function or functions and the methods used to elucidate this have varied considerably. This systematized review was undertaken to summarize both the proposed functions of eye gaze in conversations of healthy adults and the methodological approaches employed. The eligibility criteria were restricted to a healthy adult population and excluded studies that manipulated eye gaze behavior. A total of 29 articles—quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods were returned, with a wide range of methodological designs. The main areas of variability related to number of conversants, their familiarity and status, conversation topic, data collection tools—video and eye tracking—and definitions of eye gaze. The findings confirm that eye gaze facilitates turn yielding, plays a role in speech monitoring, prevents and repairs conversation breakdowns and facilitates intentional and unintentional speech interruptions. These findings were remarkably consistent given the variability in methods across the 29 articles. However, in relation to turn initiation, the results were less consistent, requiring further investigation. This review provides a starting point for future studies to make informed decisions about study methods for examining eye gaze and selecting variables of interest.

Turn-taking in human face-to-face interaction is multimodal: gaze direction and manual gestures aid the coordination of turn transitions

“…These observations have been confirmed and expanded in subsequent research (e.g. [63–67]; but see Gambi et al . [68] for evidence to the contrary in experiments with virtual agents), but the claim that gaze regulates turn-taking has been disputed by conversation analysts.…”

“…These observations have been confirmed and expanded in subsequent research (e.g. [63][64][65][66][67]; but see Gambi et al [68] for evidence to the contrary in experiments with virtual agents), but the claim that gaze regulates turn-taking has been disputed by conversation analysts. Rossano [69] has argued that gaze is not a resource for turn-taking per se but is rather a resource for formation of social actions (e.g.…”

Multilevel Modelling of Gaze from Hearing-impaired Listeners following a Realistic Conversation

“…A key difference between the stimuli used in the current experiment as compared to what a listener may experience in real-life listening was our use of recordings rather than live conversation with the listener’s participation. In real-life conversation, listeners use their eyes to communicate their attention and intentions to others (for a review, see Degutyte & Astell, 2021). Real talkers, rather than recorded ones, would better invite the potential for interaction, and may therefore elicit different eye-gaze behavior than that observed here.…”

Spatial selectivity in adaptation to gaze direction

“…In humans, our ability to monitor another person's direction of attention helps to initiate and regulate conversation and provides critical input to social cognition (e.g. perspective-taking and theory of mind; [3,4]). To determine the direction of another person's gaze, we rely on visual cues provided by their eye region, namely the pattern of contrast produced by the position of the pupil and iris relative to the (lighter) sclera, together with visual cues to head and body orientation [5,6].…”