4. Adaptive Gaze Control in an Observational Learning Task

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that influence how people look at objects they will have to act upon while watching others interact with them first. We investigated whether including different types of task-relevant information into an observational learning task would result in participants adapting their gaze towards an object with more task-relevant information. The participant watched an actor simultaneously lift and replace two objects with two hands then was cued to lift one of the two objects. The objects had the potential to change weight between each trial. In our cue condition, participants were cued to lift one of the objects every single time. In our object condition, the participants were cued equally to act on both objects; however, the weights of only one of the objects would have the potential to change. The hypothesis in the cue condition was that the participant would look significantly more at the object being cued. The hypothesis for the object condition was that the participant would look significantly more (i.e. adapt their gaze) at the object changing weight. The rationale behind this is that participants will learn to allocate their gaze significantly more towards that object so they can gain information about its properties (i.e. weight change). Pending results will indicate whether or not this occurred, and has implications for understanding eye movement sequences in visually guided behaviour tasks. The outcome of this study also has implications for the mechanisms of eye gaze with respect to social learning tasks.