Unaddressed participants' gaze in multi-person interaction: optimizing recipiency.

Judith Holler,Kobin H Kendrick

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00098

Abstract

One of the most intriguing aspects of human communication is its turn-taking system. It requires the ability to process on-going turns at talk while planning the next, and to launch this next turn without considerable overlap or delay. Recent research has investigated the eye movements of observers of dialogs to gain insight into how we process turns at talk. More specifically, this research has focused on the extent to which we are able to anticipate the end of current and the beginning of next turns. At the same time, there has been a call for shifting experimental paradigms exploring social-cognitive processes away from passive observation toward on-line processing. Here, we present research that responds to this call by situating state-of-the-art technology for tracking interlocutors’ eye movements within spontaneous, face-to-face conversation. Each conversation involved three native speakers of English. The analysis focused on question–response sequences involving just two of those participants, thus rendering the third momentarily unaddressed. Temporal analyses of the unaddressed participants’ gaze shifts from current to next speaker revealed that unaddressed participants are able to anticipate next turns, and moreover, that they often shift their gaze toward the next speaker before the current turn ends. However, an analysis of the complex structure of turns at talk revealed that the planning of these gaze shifts virtually coincides with the points at which the turns first become recognizable as possibly complete. We argue that the timing of these eye movements is governed by an organizational principle whereby unaddressed participants shift their gaze at a point that appears interactionally most optimal: It provides unaddressed participants with access to much of the visual, bodily behavior that accompanies both the current speaker’s and the next speaker’s turn, and it allows them to display recipiency with regard to both speakers’ turns.

Highlights

The contrast formed by the white sclera surrounding a darker iris and pupil is unique to the human eye (Kobayashi and Kohshima, 2001)
As we have already noted, experimental research indicates that overt eye movements are planned about 200 ms in advance of them being observed, the covert initiation of unaddressed participants’ eye movements from speaker A to speaker B occurred most frequently around 250 ms prior to the end of questions
UNADDRESSED PARTICIPANTS TRACK CURRENT SPEAKERS First of all, our analyses show that even when unaddressed participants are directly immersed in a conversation, they move their gaze from one speaker to the in about half of all question– response sequences

Summary

Introduction

The contrast formed by the white sclera surrounding a darker iris and pupil is unique to the human eye (Kobayashi and Kohshima, 2001) This contrast renders eye gaze a highly salient cue in interaction with others, and the pivotal role gaze plays in human communication has been demonstrated by numerous studies (see Argyle and Cook, 1976; Cook, 1977; Kleinke, 1986; Itier and Batty, 2009; Senju and Johnson, 2009; Rossano, 2012 for reviews). A set of rules and constraints in the model, such as a constraint on more than one speaker at a time (Sacks et al, 1974; Jefferson, 1986; Schegloff, 2000), accounts for the observation that transitions tend to occur with minimal overlap between turns. This is remarkable since quantitative studies have shown that gaps between turns are most frequently www.frontiersin.org

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