Abstract
ABSTRACT In everyday group conversations, we must decide whom to pay attention to and when. This process of dynamic social attention is important for goals both perceptual and social. The present study investigated gaze during a conversation in a realistic group and in a controlled laboratory study where third-party observers watched videos of the same group. In both contexts, we explore how gaze allocation is related to turn-taking in speech. Experimental video clips were edited to either remove the sound, freeze the video, or transition to a blank screen, allowing us to determine how shifts in attention between speakers depend on visual or auditory cues. Gaze behaviour in the real, interactive situation was similar to the fixations made by observers watching a video. Eyetracked participants often fixated the person speaking and shifted gaze in response to changes in speaker, even when sound was removed or the video freeze-framed. These findings suggest we sometimes fixate the location of speakers even when no additional visual information can be gained. Our novel approach offers both a comparison of interactive and third-party viewing and the opportunity for controlled experimental manipulations. This delivers a rich understanding of gaze behaviour and multimodal attention during a conversation following.
Highlights
In a world that is full of complex social scenes, the ability for us to selectively attend to targets of the most important is a rapid, fluid, and sophisticated process
This study is unique in that it offers a comparison between the third-party viewing of a conversation with gaze at the time of recording the stimuli in a live situation
We begin by making this comparison as a manipulation check, to first assess how visual attention in the live interaction compares with thirdparty viewing in the lab
Summary
In a world that is full of complex social scenes, the ability for us to selectively attend to targets of the most important is a rapid, fluid, and sophisticated process. A considerable amount of research has helped us determine the systems involved in selectively attending to social elements in static images, but less is understood about the processes involved in observing dynamic situations, in particular within complex social settings. A relevant observation when thinking about our own everyday interactions, and one that is replicated in the lab, is that we should attend to someone who is speaking. We examine gaze behaviour as a way to investigate the perception of social cues which allow people to follow a conversation. We introduce what is known about social gaze in the lab and in the real world
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