Abstract
In social interaction, gaze behavior provides important signals that have a significant impact on our perception of others. Previous investigations, however, have relied on paradigms in which participants are passive observers of other persons’ gazes and do not adjust their gaze behavior as is the case in real-life social encounters. We used an interactive eye-tracking paradigm that allows participants to interact with an anthropomorphic virtual character whose gaze behavior is responsive to where the participant looks on the stimulus screen in real time. The character’s gaze reactions were systematically varied along a continuum from a maximal probability of gaze aversion to a maximal probability of gaze-following during brief interactions, thereby varying contingency and congruency of the reactions. We investigated how these variations influenced whether participants believed that the character was controlled by another person (i.e., a confederate) or a computer program. In a series of experiments, the human confederate was either introduced as naïve to the task, cooperative, or competitive. Results demonstrate that the ascription of humanness increases with higher congruency of gaze reactions when participants are interacting with a naïve partner. In contrast, humanness ascription is driven by the degree of contingency irrespective of congruency when the confederate was introduced as cooperative. Conversely, during interaction with a competitive confederate, judgments were neither based on congruency nor on contingency. These results offer important insights into what renders the experience of an interaction truly social: Humans appear to have a default expectation of reciprocation that can be influenced drastically by the presumed disposition of the interactor to either cooperate or compete.
Highlights
In the last decades, considerable knowledge has been acquired about how we perceive other persons, how we interpret their nonverbal behavior, and how we ‘read’ their minds
Gaze Behavior of Participants Before assessing the ascription of humanness based on the gaze reactions of the virtual character, we aimed at excluding potential effects of participants’ own gaze behavior on performance
To assess the possibility that differences in consistency influence how participants experience the virtual character’s gaze reactions and possibly their humanness rating, the longest chain of consecutive gaze shifts to the same object was extracted from each interaction block and used to calculate an average consistency index for each participant and each condition
Summary
Considerable knowledge has been acquired about how we perceive other persons, how we interpret their nonverbal behavior, and how we ‘read’ their minds. Social interaction is investigated without interaction (‘offline’ social cognition), seemingly reflecting the view that social cognition can be sufficiently understood by investigating what a single person thinks or believes [1]. In recent years, this cognitivist and individualist approach to social cognition has been subject to criticism as it fails to incorporate the interaction process in itself, i.e. the embodiment of agents in an interaction, and the situated nature of social interaction (‘online’ social cognition, [2]). Enactive accounts of social cognition have gained popularity and suggest to investigate interaction partners in true dyadic interactions [1,3,4,5]. These accounts are based on the propositions that i) perception and action are inseparable from each other, and that ii) meaning emerges from the active exploration of and coupling with the environment
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