Chapter 2. Eye gaze as a cue for recognizing intention and coordinating joint action
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Franco Amati
Abstract
People in conversation are highly sensitive to where others are looking. It has been argued that eye gaze is such a compelling social signal that following the gaze of another person is practically reflexive. Others have demonstrated that the role of gaze in interaction is more flexible. The direction of eye gaze can be informative about what a person is searching for, monitoring, orienting toward, referring to, deciding to choose, planning, or intending. But because it can signal all of these things (or none of them, as when attention is captured inadvertently by something sudden or salient), a look is often ambiguous. In this chapter, we consider the contributions of eye gaze to recognizing intentions and coordinating joint action in spatial contexts. To the extent that gazing at an object is instrumental to what the gazer is doing, a look can provide a window for an experimenter into the gazer’s cognitive processing, a cue for an interacting partner about the gazer’s intention, or a hint for a marketer about the gazer’s preference or indecision. Patterns of looks can be interpreted by people engaged in perspective taking, or by automated pattern recognizers engaged in mind-reading. Finally, eye gaze has the potential to be deployed communicatively, as when one person intends that another recognize what she is attending to and use this information to coordinate their behavior. We discuss evidence about how observers use gaze cues (whether interactively or non-interactively) in contexts where they can see the gazer’s face, as well as during remote electronic communication by way of a shared gaze system where each partner’s gaze is represented to the other by a dynamic cursor displayed over a shared screen.
Abstract
People in conversation are highly sensitive to where others are looking. It has been argued that eye gaze is such a compelling social signal that following the gaze of another person is practically reflexive. Others have demonstrated that the role of gaze in interaction is more flexible. The direction of eye gaze can be informative about what a person is searching for, monitoring, orienting toward, referring to, deciding to choose, planning, or intending. But because it can signal all of these things (or none of them, as when attention is captured inadvertently by something sudden or salient), a look is often ambiguous. In this chapter, we consider the contributions of eye gaze to recognizing intentions and coordinating joint action in spatial contexts. To the extent that gazing at an object is instrumental to what the gazer is doing, a look can provide a window for an experimenter into the gazer’s cognitive processing, a cue for an interacting partner about the gazer’s intention, or a hint for a marketer about the gazer’s preference or indecision. Patterns of looks can be interpreted by people engaged in perspective taking, or by automated pattern recognizers engaged in mind-reading. Finally, eye gaze has the potential to be deployed communicatively, as when one person intends that another recognize what she is attending to and use this information to coordinate their behavior. We discuss evidence about how observers use gaze cues (whether interactively or non-interactively) in contexts where they can see the gazer’s face, as well as during remote electronic communication by way of a shared gaze system where each partner’s gaze is represented to the other by a dynamic cursor displayed over a shared screen.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
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Part 1. Theoretical considerations
- Chapter 2. Eye gaze as a cue for recognizing intention and coordinating joint action 21
- Chapter 3. Effects of a speaker’s gaze on language comprehension and acquisition 47
- Chapter 4. Weaving oneself into others 67
- Chapter 5. On the role of gaze for successful and efficient communication 91
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Part 2. Methodological considerations
- Chapter 6. Quantifying the interplay of gaze and gesture in deixis using an experimental-simulative approach 109
- Chapter 7. Gaze and face-to-face interaction 139
- Chapter 8. Automatic analysis of in-the-wild mobile eye-tracking experiments using object, face and person detection 169
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Part 3. Case studies
- Chapter 9. Gaze, addressee selection and turn-taking in three-party interaction 197
- Chapter 10. Gaze as a predictor for lexical and gestural alignment 233
- Chapter 11. Mobile dual eye-tracking in face-to-face interaction 265
- Chapter 12. Displaying recipiency in an interpreter-mediated dialogue 301
- Index 323
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
-
Part 1. Theoretical considerations
- Chapter 2. Eye gaze as a cue for recognizing intention and coordinating joint action 21
- Chapter 3. Effects of a speaker’s gaze on language comprehension and acquisition 47
- Chapter 4. Weaving oneself into others 67
- Chapter 5. On the role of gaze for successful and efficient communication 91
-
Part 2. Methodological considerations
- Chapter 6. Quantifying the interplay of gaze and gesture in deixis using an experimental-simulative approach 109
- Chapter 7. Gaze and face-to-face interaction 139
- Chapter 8. Automatic analysis of in-the-wild mobile eye-tracking experiments using object, face and person detection 169
-
Part 3. Case studies
- Chapter 9. Gaze, addressee selection and turn-taking in three-party interaction 197
- Chapter 10. Gaze as a predictor for lexical and gestural alignment 233
- Chapter 11. Mobile dual eye-tracking in face-to-face interaction 265
- Chapter 12. Displaying recipiency in an interpreter-mediated dialogue 301
- Index 323
