Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: When eye see you: Gaze and joint attention in human interaction Maria Staudte ([email protected] ) Ulrich Pfeiffer ([email protected]) Department of Computational Linguistics Saarland University Department of Psychiatry University Hospital Cologne cognition and communication are among the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Due to the broad impact of joint attention on social and communicative skills, its study has become a major focus in the empirical research on ASD. The majority of this research is dedicated to understanding the implications of mutual and triadic gaze for the develop- ment of skills related to communication among typically de- veloping individuals and those with ASD (Mundy, Gwaltney, & Henderson, 2010; Redcay et al., 2012). Overall, this workshop aims to explore how traditionally separate research areas such as social cognition/neuroscience, psycholinguistics, human-computer interaction and develop- mental psychology contribute to an understanding of the gen- eral phenomenon of gaze-following and joint attention from all these different perspectives – and how these fields can ben- efit and learn from each other, e.g. by comparing different approaches and methodologies. Keywords: joint attention; gaze; social interaction; language processing; dialog; grounding. Topic and Goals Gaze behavior provides fundamental mechanisms for sharing mental states such as goals and desires and helps to ground communicative content. In order to establish common ground in verbal and non-verbal interactions, interlocutors often need to acquire knowledge about their interaction partners’ focus of visual attention by following their gaze and, in turn, have to direct their partners attention to their own target object or location. Responding to or leading someone’s gaze to a loca- tion or an object of interest results in a situation of joint at- tention - a referential triad between two individuals and some entity in the environment. As people often look at what they attend to and where they intend to act, joint attention is con- sidered fundamental to an understanding of other minds and the interaction with other individuals. Joint attention plays an important role in numerous social- cognitive processes, including Theory-of-Mind (Tomasello, 1995), perspective taking (Moll & Meltzoff, 2011), and pro- cesses relating to learning and memory from early infancy throughout adulthood (Kim & Mundy, 2012). However, de- spite extensive research in virtually all areas of cognitive sci- ence aiming at an understanding of behavioral functions, cog- nitive processes, and neural mechanisms of joint attention, there is a plethora of unresolved questions. The interplay of the development of joint attention and language during in- fancy (Baldwin, 1995) or the relation between joint atten- tion and the perception of other persons (Frischen, Bayliss, & Tipper, 2007) are among those. Finally, the neural cir- cuits subserving our ability to engage in joint attention have been investigated only recently because appropriate meth- ods to study gaze-based face-to-face interaction in real-time have only recently been made available (Redcay et al., 2010; Schilbach et al., 2010). In addition to its role in social cognition, seeing and follow- ing or directing someone else’s gaze is crucial for effective language learning (Morales et al., 2000) and language pro- cessing in adults (Clark & Krych, 2004; Hanna & Brennan, 2007; Staudte & Crocker, 2011). Monitoring each other’s gaze behavior supports the understanding of what the inter- locutor is saying or understanding (Richardson & Dale, 2005; Hanna & Brennan, 2007) and fosters the synchronization of interlocutors in discourse (Garrod & Pickering, 2004). Thus, initiating or establishing joint attention at a chosen point dur- ing dialog can be a powerful means to augment and modulate linguistic content. Finally, severe impairments in multiple aspects of social Relevance to the the CogSci Conference Recently, there has been an increased interest in psycholin- guistics and human-computer interaction as well as in social cognition and ASD research to investigate human commu- nication processes in more interactive settings. In particu- lar, scientists have tried to extend their theories and exper- imental designs by the visual presence and the induced dy- namics of an interaction partner in order to accommodate the complex non-verbal behavior that typically accompanies and greatly influences linguistic interaction. The domain of gaze has aroused particular interest as single acts of looking com- bine perception and action in social encounters. By establish- ing joint attention, for instance, gaze behavior guides the ex- change of goals and desires which are critical motivations for communication. However, experiments incorporating such complex and dynamic yet crucial aspects of human interac- tion are difficult to implement and a challenge to traditionally very controlled procedures. In this workshop, we would like to gather researchers from related fields and bring them closer together by providing a platform for exchanging theories and approaches as well as methodology that is suited for investi- gating the use and effect of gaze in human interaction (e.g. Redcay et al., 2010; Saito et al., 2010; Wilms et al., 2010). All related fields are core areas of cognitive science and our research questions are currently of high interest in the field (as partly reflected also by the invited symposium Joint Action). Suitability of the Organizers Dr. Maria Staudte has a background in psycholinguistics and human-agent-interaction and has published in established journals and conferences such as Cognition, HRI, and the An-
Authors: Maria Staudte, Ulrich J. Pfeiffer
Institution: Saarland University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2404411537