Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty?

Doherty‐Sneddon, Gwyneth; Phelps, Fiona G.

doi:10.3758/bf03195338

Cited by 203 publications

(195 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…A further possibility is that the "regressions" recorded in the illegible condition often reflected a simple recentering of the gaze: The question sentences ended toward the right edge of the screen, and we might not expect participants to hold their gaze to the right at this point. Participants were also answering a question, so the "regressions" may have reflected a kind of gaze aversion (e.g., Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps, 2005). This recentering account fits with the interactions between legibility and target position on regression depth and on regression error: Untargeted recentering fixations would land farther from early targets, which were nearer the left edge of the screen, than from late targets.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, eye movements to blank space are used strategically to avoid automatically processing information: When answering questions, participants often avoid their questioner's gaze, especially when the questions are difficult (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). This apparently prevents cognitive overload that might result from fixating the questioner's face and searching for the answer at the same time (Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps, 2005). When reading, any regression will fixate text, and it may be very difficult for the participant to avoid rereading the fixated word.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The function of regressions in reading: Backward eye movements allow rereading

Booth

Weger

2012

Mem Cogn

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Standard text reading involves frequent eye movements that go against normal reading order. The function of these "regressions" is still largely unknown. The most obvious explanation is that regressions allow for the rereading of previously fixated words. Alternatively, physically returning the eyes to a word's location could cue the reader's memory for that word, effectively aiding the comprehension process via location priming (the "deictic pointer hypothesis"). In Experiment 1, regression frequency was reduced when readers knew that information was no longer available for rereading. In Experiment 2, readers listened to auditorily presented text while moving their eyes across visual placeholders on the screen. Here, rereading was impossible, but deictic pointers remained available, yet the readers did not make targeted regressions in this experiment. In Experiment 3, target words in normal sentences were changed after reading. Where the eyes later regressed to these words, participants generally remained unaware of the change, and their answers to comprehension questions indicated that the new meaning of the changed word was what determined their sentence representations. These results suggest that readers use regressions to reread words and not to cue their memory for previously read words.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The function of regressions in reading: Backward eye movements allow rereading

Booth

Weger

2012

Mem Cogn

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“…Participants were also required to ask the experimenter a set of pre-prepared questions and listen to answers given by the experimenter. It has previously been demonstrated that individuals use gaze aversion when processing cognitively demanding information (Doherty-Sneddon et al, 2002;Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps, 2005;Glenberg et al, 1998). In a social interaction people show little gaze aversion when they are listening to another person speak, rather gaze aversion predominantly occurs when people are thinking about a response and when they are speaking (Doherty-Sneddon et al, 2002;Glenberg et al, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brief Report: Patterns of Eye Movements in Face to Face Conversation are Associated with Autistic Traits: Evidence from a Student Sample

Vabalas

Freeth

2015

J Autism Dev Disord

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The current study investigated whether the amount of autistic traits shown by an individual is associated with viewing behaviour during a face-to-face interaction. The eye movements of 36 neurotypical university students were recorded using a mobile eye-tracking device. High amounts of autistic traits were neither associated with reduced looking to the social partner overall, nor with reduced looking to the face. However, individuals who were high in autistic traits exhibited reduced visual exploration during the face-to-face interaction overall, as demonstrated by shorter and less frequent saccades. Visual exploration was not related to social anxiety. This study suggests that there are systematic individual differences in visual exploration during social interactions and these are related to amount of autistic traits.

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“…Psycholinguistic research has shown that speakers often avert their gaze when asked questions and that this in turn facilitates remembering and speech planning (Glenberg et al, 1998;Doherty-Sneddon and Phelps, 2005;Markson and Paterson, 2009). Thusthewithdrawalofgazeinthe transition space before a relevant next turn may be a public exponent of a private search for recognition, as is arguably the case in the next extract.…”

Section: Searching For Late Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Holler

Kendrick

Casillas

et al. 2016

Frontiers Research Topics

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The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields

show abstract

Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty?

Cited by 203 publications

References 25 publications

The function of regressions in reading: Backward eye movements allow rereading

The function of regressions in reading: Backward eye movements allow rereading

Brief Report: Patterns of Eye Movements in Face to Face Conversation are Associated with Autistic Traits: Evidence from a Student Sample

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

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