Abstract
Gaze is instrumental in coordinating face-to-face social interactions. But little is known about gaze use when social interactions co-occur with other joint activities. We investigated the case of walking while talking. We assessed how gaze gets allocated among various targets in mobile conversations, whether allocation of gaze to other targets affects conversational coordination, and whether reduced availability of gaze for conversational coordination affects conversational performance and content. In an experimental study, pairs were videotaped in four conditions of mobility (standing still, talking while walking along a straight-line itinerary, talking while walking along a complex itinerary, or walking along a complex itinerary with no conversational task). Gaze to partners was substantially reduced in mobile conversations, but gaze was still used to coordinate conversation via displays of mutual orientation, and conversational performance and content was not different between stationary and mobile conditions. Results expand the phenomena of multitasking to joint activities.
Highlights
Everyday conversation is perhaps the commonest form of human joint action (Sacks et al, 1974)
How does resource sharing happen and what consequences does it entail? Does reduced availability of a resource detract from coordination and impair conversational performance? Or are participants able to flexibly compensate to maintain coordination? We explored these issues for the case of gaze
We performed a 4 × 2 × 2 mixed ANOVA on the proportion of time spent gazing at the partner
Summary
Everyday conversation is perhaps the commonest form of human joint action (Sacks et al, 1974). Rossano (2012b) showed that a participant engaged in cooking pasta on a stove while listening to a story periodically shifted his gaze back and forth between the narrator and the stove, displaying an orientation to the narrator’s talk while cooking These data raise the possibility that while gaze patterns in multiple joint activities may differ from those in a single joint activity, gaze may continue to serve an important coordination function, namely displaying a mutual orientation to the conversation. Listeners engaged in monitoring another activity concurrent to conversation shift gaze back and forth between speakers (to display recipiency) and that other activity (Rossano, 2012b) In our study, it follows that listeners will periodically look at narrators. As a measure of content, we compared the relative frequency of affect and cognition words in the narrators’ speech across experimental conditions using the LIWC software package (Pennebaker et al, 2001) which enables automated content analysis of texts
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