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Older children, but not younger children, were found to look away more from the face of an interlocutor when answering difficult as opposed to easy questions. Similar results were found in earlier work with adults, who often avert their gaze during cognitively difficult tasks (A.M. Glenberg, J.L. Schroeder, & D.A. Robertson, 1998). Twenty-five 8-year-olds and 26 5-year-olds answered verbal reasoning and arithmetic questions of varying difficulty. The older children increased gaze aversion from the face of the adult questioner in response to both difficult verbal reasoning questions and difficult arithmetic questions. In contrast, younger children (5-year-olds) responded less consistently to cognitive difficulty.It is concluded that adultlike patterns of gaze aversion in response to cognitive difficulty are certainly acquired by 8 years of age. The implications of appropriate gaze aversion for children's management of cognitive resources are considered.Development of Gaze Aversion 3 During difficult cognitive activity, for example remembering information, thinking of an answer to a question, planning what we are going to say, and speaking, we often close our eyes, look up at the sky, or look away from the person we are in conversation with. A number of studies, described below, report ways in which adults switch off from environmental stimulation (both live faces and other sorts of visual displays) in order to concentrate on cognitive tasks. In contrast, there has been little done on gaze aversion as a response to cognitive demands in children. This is a potentially important omission since the efficiency with which children process information influences many aspects of their development, including school progress. This article reports a study of gaze aversion in two age groups of children. In our introduction we first look at the evidence linking visual communication signals and cognitive effort.We then discuss why children might differ from adults in their strategies to deal with this cognitive effort. The final section of the introduction describes the motivations behind the current study. Visual Communication Signals and Cognitive EffortConsiderable research effort has been expended on examining the role played by visual communication signals in human interaction. There is much evidence that visual communication signals (such as eye gaze, gesture and facial expression) are often important sources of information. Indeed many researchers propose that such signals play a facilitatory role in human communication (for example, Clark & Brennan, 1991;Goldin-Meadow, Wein, & Chang, 1992;McNeill, 1985). However, the fact that such signals are informative means that they carry a cognitive load. The processing costs of visual signals are documented. A number of researchers have linked excessive eye gaze with increased cognitive load on interlocutors (Beattie, 1981;Ellyson, Dovidio, & Corson, 1981). In addition, the cognitive difficulty of a task seems to relate to the likelihood that people avert their gaze ...

We describe a set of face processing tests suitable for use with children aged from 4 to 10 years, which include tests of expression, lipreading and gaze processing as well as identification. The tests can be administered on paper or using a computer, and comparisons between the performance on computer- and paper-based versions suggest that format of administration makes little difference. We present results obtained from small samples of children at four different age groups (Study 1, computer-based tests), and larger samples at three age groups (Study 2, paper-based tests) from preschool to 10 years of age. The tests were found to be developmentally sensitive. There were quite strong correlations between performance on different tests of the same face processing ability (e.g. gaze processing), and generally rather weaker correlations between tests of different abilities

This article examined communication and task performance in face-to-face, copresent, and video-mediated communication (VMC). Study 1 showed that when participants in a collaborative problem-solving task could both see and hear each other, the structure of their dialogues differed compared with dialogues obtained when they only heard each other. The audio-only conversations had more words, and these extra utterances often provided and elicited verbal feedback functions, which visual signals can deliver when available. Study 2, however, showed that high-quality VMC did not appear to deliver the same benefits as face-to-face, copresent interaction. It appears that novelty, attenuation, and remoteness all may have contributed to the effects found-factors that should be considered by designers of remote video-conferencing systems.A major assumption behind the building of video communication technology is that visual signals are

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A series of experiments are reported in which pairs of subjects performed a collaborative task remotely and communicated either via video and audio links or audio links only. Using the same task (the ‘map task'), Boyle et al. (1994) found clear benefits of seeing the face compared with audio-only co-present interaction. Pairs who could see each other needed to say less to achieve the same level of performance as pairs who could only hear each other. In contrast to these findings, in all three experiments reported here, users of video links produced longer and more interrupted dialogues than those who had audio links only, although there were no differences in performance. Performance was affected when the video links were of low bandwidth, resulting in transmission delays. The drop in accuracy was correlated with a significant increase in levels of interrupted speech. We also compared the structure of dialogues and the use of gaze in high-quality video-mediated communication with those produced in face-to-face co-present interactions. Results show that both face-to-face and video-mediated speakers use visual cues to check for mutual understanding. When they cannot see each other such checks need to be conducted verbally, accounting for the length effect in dialogues. However, despite using visual cues in the same way as face-to-face speakers, video does not provide the same advantage of shorter and less interrupted dialogues. In addition, users of video gaze far more overall than face-to-face speakers. We suggest that when speakers are not physically co-present they are less confident in general that they have mutual understanding, even though they can see their interlocutors, and therefore over-compensate by increasing the level of both verbal and nonverbal information

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