Human Gaze Direction Research Articles

Visual–spatial attention as a comfort measure in human–robot collaborative tasks

In this paper, we propose a new formulation to consider visual–spatial attention in order to improve the comfort of a human standing or operating near a collaborative robot. This formulation is based on the principle of having the robot’s end-effector in the human visual–spatial attention as much as possible. The integration of this new constraint into the Inverse Kinematics (IK) problem is thoroughly studied and efficient solutions are proposed. Moreover, to allow the robot to react rapidly in the case of unforeseen events, adding the manipulability index to the IK problem is also studied and its impact is analyzed.The proposed method is then extensively tested in simulation and verified on the real Baxter research robot, these experiments pointed out the method efficiency to improve the task visibility while avoiding self-occlusion and singular configurations. Moreover, real experiments revealed the method robustness to uncertainties such as imprecision of detecting human gaze direction.

Study on Combination of Human Position and Gaze Direction Measurement for Gazed Object Estimation in Wide Area

Study on Combination of Human Position and Gaze Direction Measurement for Gazed Object Estimation in Wide Area

Effect of Human Face and gaze direction in Advertising

Effect of Human Face and gaze direction in Advertising

The effect of human face and gaze direction in advertising

Advertising is the most common form of communicating in marketing and employing human face in advertisement, is one of the most popular ways of influencing the audience. Also, advertising can survive and increase business growth if its effectiveness is appropriately determined and investigated. Ideally, advertising effectiveness in market must be analysed by standard and effective techniques, which can be assessed through complementing advantages of 'communicational' and 'observational' methods. Due to the lack of a native related study in Iranian literature, this experimental study conducted on Iranian participants. Results indicate that the use of human face leads to better attitude towards the advertisement and attract more attention, especially to the image part of the advertisement. In particular, the presence of human faces causes less attention to the product that is being advertised, a smart use of 'human gaze' can disengage attention from the face and direct it towards the ad's product and message.

Herring gulls respond to human gaze direction.

Human–wildlife conflict is one of the greatest threats to species populations worldwide. One species facing national declines in the UK is the herring gull (Larus argentatus), despite an increase in numbers in urban areas. Gulls in urban areas are often considered a nuisance owing to behaviours such as food-snatching. Whether urban gull feeding behaviour is influenced by human behavioural cues, such as gaze direction, remains unknown. We therefore measured the approach times of herring gulls to a food source placed in close proximity to an experimenter who either looked directly at the gull or looked away. We found that only 26% of targeted gulls would touch the food, suggesting that food-snatching is likely to be conducted by a minority of individuals. When gulls did touch the food, they took significantly longer to approach when the experimenter's gaze was directed towards them compared with directed away. However, inter-individual behaviour varied greatly, with some gulls approaching similarly quickly in both treatments, while others approached much more slowly when the experimenter was looking at them. These results indicate that reducing human–herring gull conflict may be possible through small changes in human behaviour, but will require consideration of behavioural differences between individual gulls.

マジック状況における人間の顔や視線方向への偏重注視

マジック状況における人間の顔や視線方向への偏重注視

Discrimination of human gaze direction by chimpanzees

Discrimination of human gaze direction by chimpanzees

Brown (Eulemur fulvus) and Ring-Tailed Lemurs (Lemur catta) Use Human Head Orientation as a Cue to Gaze Direction in a Food Choice Task

Whilst the ability to follow human gaze has been demonstrated in monkeys and apes, there is little evidence that prosimians share this ability. The current study used a food choice paradigm to assess whether captive brown (Eulemur fulvus) and ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) use human gaze direction as a cue when choosing between an attending or non-attending human. Four experiments assessed the use of body, head and eye cues by the lemurs. In experiment 1, the non-attending human stood with her back to a food item; 3 of the 5 lemurs preferentially chose the attending human with an equivalent food item in view. In experiments 2 and 3, which used head angles of 90°, 4 out of 5 lemurs preferentially chose the attending human. In experiment 4, in which the humans differed only by whether their eyes were open or shut, no significant preferences were found. This study provides the first tentative evidence that lemurs are capable of discriminating human gaze direction and can use both body and head direction to do so.

Visual Search for Human Gaze Direction by a Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)

BackgroundHumans detect faces with direct gazes among those with averted gazes more efficiently than they detect faces with averted gazes among those with direct gazes. We examined whether this “stare-in-the-crowd” effect occurs in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), whose eye morphology differs from that of humans (i.e., low-contrast eyes, dark sclera).Methodology/Principal FindingsAn adult female chimpanzee was trained to search for an odd-item target (front view of a human face) among distractors that differed from the target only with respect to the direction of the eye gaze. During visual-search testing, she performed more efficiently when the target was a direct-gaze face than when it was an averted-gaze face. This direct-gaze superiority was maintained when the faces were inverted and when parts of the face were scrambled. Subsequent tests revealed that gaze perception in the chimpanzee was controlled by the contrast between iris and sclera, as in humans, but that the chimpanzee attended only to the position of the iris in the eye, irrespective of head direction.Conclusion/SignificanceThese results suggest that the chimpanzee can discriminate among human gaze directions and are more sensitive to direct gazes. However, limitations in the perception of human gaze by the chimpanzee are suggested by her inability to completely transfer her performance to faces showing a three-quarter view.

LEARNING GAZE DIRECTION PERCEPTION - AN INVESTIGATION BY BEHAVIORAL AND NEUROCOMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES

The gaze direction perception is an important component of human social cognition, but the ontogenesis of this perceptual ability is not well known. The present study attempted to investigate the ontogenesis of the well-documented characteristics of the human gaze direction perception that the head orientation information influences the perceived gaze direction. The results showed that a simple connectionist model of the human visual system could simulate several important aspects of human performance after trained by the supervised-learning, indicating that the postnatal perceptual-learning plays some roles in the development of the gaze direction perception.

Eyes are special but not for everyone: The case of autism

Current research indicates that human gaze direction is a special cue for shifting attention for one of two reasons: (1) it reflects social desires and intentions and (2) its basic perceptual features usually correspond to important events in the environment. This study, conducted with individuals with autism and with age- and IQ-matched typically developing individuals, dissociates these two often-confounded explanations and demonstrates that eyes appear to be special for typically developing individuals because of their social power, whereas gaze effects are mediated by feature correspondence among persons with autism.

Cues that chimpanzees do and do not use to find hidden objects

Chimpanzees follow conspecific and human gaze direction reliably in some situations, but very few chimpanzees reliably use gaze direction or other communicative signals to locate hidden food in the object-choice task. Three studies aimed at exploring factors that affect chimpanzee performance in this task are reported. In the first study, vocalizations and other noises facilitated the performance of some chimpanzees (only a minority). In the second study, various behavioral cues were given in which a human experimenter either touched, approached, or actually lifted and looked under the container where the food was hidden. Each of these cues led to enhanced performance for only a very few individuals. In the third study – a replication with some methodological improvements of a previous experiment – chimpanzees were confronted with two experimenters giving conflicting cues about the location of the hidden food, with one of them (the knower) having witnessed the hiding process and the other (the guesser) not. In the crucial test in which a third experimenter did the hiding, no chimpanzee found the food at above chance levels. Overall, in all three studies, by far the best performers were two individuals who had been raised in infancy by humans. It thus seems that while chimpanzees are very good at “behavior reading” of various sorts, including gaze following, they do not understand the communicative intentions (informative intentions) behind the looking and gesturing of others – with the possible exception of enculturated chimpanzees, who still do not understand the differential significance of looking and gesturing done by people who have different knowledge about states of affairs in the world.

Communication of Food Location Between Human and Dog (Canis Familiaris)

Two domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) participated in a series of studies in which they communicated with a human about the location of hidden food. In the first study both dogs were able to follow human pointing reliably to one of several locations where food was hidden, both in front of them and behind them. They also showed some skills at following human gaze direction in this same task, when both head and eyes indicated the same location. They did not follow eye direction when it conflicted with head direction. A second study clearly ruled out a low-level visual tracking explanation for at least one of the subjects. In a third study one of the two dogs was able to lead a naive human to one of three locations containing food consistently, mainly by barking and orienting its body to the food. The subject did not behave differently, however, when the human turned his back or covered his eyes; he continued to orient to the food and bark under all conditions. In a fourth study in which more clearly visual signals were involved, both subjects strongly preferred to drop a retrieved object at the front of, rather than at the back of, the human — even when the human turned his back so that subjects had to bring the object around his body upon return. The knowledge of human pointing and gaze direction displayed by these two domestic dogs is in many ways comparable to that displayed in experimental studies by nonhuman primates.

Gaze following and joint attention in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).

Gaze and attention direction provide important sources of social information for primates. Behavioral studies show that chimpanzees spontaneously follow human gaze direction. By contrast, non-ape species such as macaques fail to follow gaze cues. The authors investigated the reactions of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to attention cues of conspecifics. Two subjects were presented with videotaped images of a stimulus monkey with its attention directed to 1 of 2 identical objects. Analysis of eye movements revealed that both subjects inspected the target (object or position attended by the stimulus monkey) more often than the distractor (nonattended object or position). These results provide evidence that rhesus monkeys follow gaze and use the attention cues of other monkeys to orient their own attention to objects.