Abstract
Finding the underlying principles of social attention in humans seems to be essential for the design of the interaction between natural and artificial agents. Here, we focus on the computational modeling of gaze dynamics as exhibited by humans when perceiving socially relevant multimodal information. The audio-visual landscape of social interactions is distilled into a number of multimodal patches that convey different social value, and we work under the general frame of foraging as a tradeoff between local patch exploitation and landscape exploration. We show that the spatio-temporal dynamics of gaze shifts can be parsimoniously described by Langevin-type stochastic differential equations triggering a decision equation over time. In particular, value-based patch choice and handling is reduced to a simple multi-alternative perceptual decision making that relies on a race-to-threshold between independent continuous-time perceptual evidence integrators, each integrator being associated with a patch.
Highlights
The main concern of this work is modeling gaze dynamics as exhibited by humans when perceiving socially relevant multimodal information
The simulated model generates scan paths that mimic human scan paths in terms of spatiotemporal statistics: the saccade amplitude distributions exhibit a multimodal shape, with short saccades preferred to long ones; fixation duration distributions from both real and simulated data reveal a right-skewed and heavy-tailed shape; prima facie, a high similarity can be noticed between saccade direction distributions of real and simulated data
A preliminary, qualitative inspection shows that the Proposed model, much like the GazeDeploy model, gives rise to empirical densities that are close to those yielded by real subjects
Summary
The main concern of this work is modeling gaze dynamics as exhibited by humans when perceiving socially relevant multimodal information. It is known that under certain circumstances humans spend the majority of time scrutinizing people, markedly their eyes and faces, and spotting persons that are talking (cfr., Foulsham et al, 2010, for framing this study, but see Hessels, 2020 for an in-depth discussion under general conditions and an up-to-date review) This is not surprising since social gazing abilities are likely to have played a significant role very early in the primate lineage (Shepherd and Platt, 2007). The act of directing the eyes toward a location in the visual world, is considered a good measure of overt attention (Kustov and Robinson, 1996) This makes the research problem addressed here relevant for many aspects, with promising applications in different fields, such as social robotics, social gaze analysis, and clinical studies (Hessels, 2020). A broad research spectrum has been established from traditional laboratory
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
