The effect of non-communicative eye movements on joint attention

Caruana, Nathan; Alhasan, Ayeh; Wagner, Kirilee; Kaplan, David; Woolgar, Alexandra; McArthur, Genevieve

doi:10.1177/1747021820945604

Cited by 5 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 51 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This task feature is consistent with previous experimental studies of joint attention responsivity (see Caruana et al, 2017 for a methodological review) and is essential in allowing each participant to signal their readiness to engage in the next trial without interrupting the reciprocal nature of the interaction with a salient environmental cue 10 . Eye contact is also an intuitive and ecologically-valid signal of communicative intent when initiating both non-verbal 15 , 17 , 19 and verbal 18 interactions. Nevertheless, it is possible that this task feature may have strengthened the tendencies of some participants to attend to their partner’s face during joint attention trials.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, because shifts in gaze are both rapid and ubiquitous during face-to-face interactions, they have the capacity to provide continuous information about a social partner’s locus of attention and mental state 14 . However, these same characteristics also make social gaze a ‘noisy’ signal of intentional joint attention bids, since they are not always intentional, informative, or communicative 15 . For this reason, additional information, such as ostensive direct gaze (i.e., eye contact), are often needed during gaze-based interactions to convey the communicative intent of subsequent gaze shifts 16 – 19 .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These empirical blind spots exist due to a lack of experimental paradigms and technologies that can support realistic dyadic social interactions, whilst ensuring experimental control and objective measures of attention and socially responsive behaviours 10 , 25 . Several studies in the past decade have pioneered interactive paradigms for joint attention research, however the vast majority of these have exclusively examined gaze-based interactions 12 , 15 , 26 – 28 .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, we wanted to investigate whether responders were influenced by this predictive gaze information, despite the availability of explicit pointing gestures. Previous gaze-only joint attention paradigms have found that people use spatial information conveyed by non-communicative eye-movements to facilitate responsivity to an upcoming gaze-cued joint attention bid 15 , 17 . Along the same lines, we predicted that responders would make faster saccades towards the target when initiator gaze and point behaviours were spatially congruent than spatially incongruent with each other.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, we wanted to determine the extent to which participants spontaneously established eye contact before joint attention in our task, which did not force participants to communicate exclusively via social gaze. Previous studies of joint attention in gaze-based tasks have highlighted the importance of eye contact for facilitating joint attention responsivity 16 , 32 , presumably because eye contact provides an ostensive signal of communicative intent 15 , 17 , 18 . Given that pointing gestures inherently signal communicative intent, we anticipated that eye contact would rarely be established before achieving joint attention.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Gaze facilitates responsivity during hand coordinated joint attention

Caruana

Inkley

Nalepka

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The coordination of attention between individuals is a fundamental part of everyday human social interaction. Previous work has focused on the role of gaze information for guiding responses during joint attention episodes. However, in many contexts, hand gestures such as pointing provide another valuable source of information about the locus of attention. The current study developed a novel virtual reality paradigm to investigate the extent to which initiator gaze information is used by responders to guide joint attention responses in the presence of more visually salient and spatially precise pointing gestures. Dyads were instructed to use pointing gestures to complete a cooperative joint attention task in a virtual environment. Eye and hand tracking enabled real-time interaction and provided objective measures of gaze and pointing behaviours. Initiators displayed gaze behaviours that were spatially congruent with the subsequent pointing gestures. Responders overtly attended to the initiator’s gaze during the joint attention episode. However, both these initiator and responder behaviours were highly variable across individuals. Critically, when responders did overtly attend to their partner’s face, their saccadic reaction times were faster when the initiator’s gaze was also congruent with the pointing gesture, and thus predictive of the joint attention location. These results indicate that humans attend to and process gaze information to facilitate joint attention responsivity, even in contexts where gaze information is implicit to the task and joint attention is explicitly cued by more spatially precise and visually salient pointing gestures.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Gaze facilitates responsivity during hand coordinated joint attention

Caruana

Inkley

Nalepka

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Autistic young people adaptively use gaze to facilitate joint attention during multi-gestural dyadic interactions

Caruana,

Nalepka,

Perez

et al. 2023

Autism

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Autistic people often experience difficulties navigating face-to-face social interactions. Historically, the empirical literature has characterised these difficulties as cognitive ‘deficits’ in social information processing. However, the empirical basis for such claims is lacking, with most studies failing to capture the complexity of social interactions, often distilling them into singular communicative modalities (e.g. gaze-based communication) that are rarely used in isolation in daily interactions. The current study examined how gaze was used in concert with communicative hand gestures during joint attention interactions. We employed an immersive virtual reality paradigm, where autistic ( n = 22) and non-autistic ( n = 22) young people completed a collaborative task with a non-autistic confederate. Integrated eye-, head- and hand-motion-tracking enabled dyads to communicate naturally with each other while offering objective measures of attention and behaviour. Autistic people in our sample were similarly, if not more, effective in responding to hand-cued joint attention bids compared with non-autistic people. Moreover, both autistic and non-autistic people demonstrated an ability to adaptively use gaze information to aid coordination. Our findings suggest that the intersecting fields of autism and social neuroscience research may have overstated the role of eye gaze during coordinated social interactions. Lay abstract Autistic people have been said to have ‘problems’ with joint attention, that is, looking where someone else is looking. Past studies of joint attention have used tasks that require autistic people to continuously look at and respond to eye-gaze cues. But joint attention can also be done using other social cues, like pointing. This study looked at whether autistic and non-autistic young people use another person’s eye gaze during joint attention in a task that did not require them to look at their partner’s face. In the task, each participant worked together with their partner to find a computer-generated object in virtual reality. Sometimes the participant had to help guide their partner to the object, and other times, they followed their partner’s lead. Participants were told to point to guide one another but were not told to use eye gaze. Both autistic and non-autistic participants often looked at their partner’s face during joint attention interactions and were faster to respond to their partner’s hand-pointing when the partner also looked at the object before pointing. This shows that autistic people can and do use information from another person’s eyes, even when they don’t have to. It is possible that, by not forcing autistic young people to look at their partner’s face and eyes, they were better able to gather information from their partner’s face when needed, without being overwhelmed. This shows how important it is to design tasks that provide autistic people with opportunities to show what they can do.

show abstract

Gaze cues (repeatedly) fail to influence person evaluation.

Gregory,

Pullinen,

Jackson

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Eye gaze is an important social signal that people generally cannot help but follow, leading to joint attention. Joint attention has been shown to speed basic processing of objects, enhance memory for them, and even affect immediate value-based appraisal by increasing object likability. Here, across 8 experiments, we investigate for the first time whether jointly attending to other faces affects their longer-term social value (liking, trust) and attentional value (attention allocation and prioritisation). Emanating the basic gaze cuing paradigm, a central cue face looked towards or away from a ‘target’ face, which the participant had to respond to. Unbeknown to participants some target faces were always looked at (jointly attended – high value) and others were never looked at (‘ignored’ - low value). In studies 1 - 6 we investigated how these gaze-induced value conditions affected subsequent liking and trust social judgements of a person. Then, in studies 7 and 8 we additionally investigated whether effects of gaze on others may occur implicitly, effecting subsequent attentional engagement with others by using the target faces as gaze cues, or attentional targets in a dot probe task. Confirmed through mini meta-analysis, we found no significant effect of being jointly attended vs. ignored on either the social (N = 214) or attentional (N = 77) value of faces. We discuss whether faces are special and different to objects in this context.

show abstract

The effect of non-communicative eye movements on joint attention

Cited by 5 publications

References 51 publications

Gaze facilitates responsivity during hand coordinated joint attention

Gaze facilitates responsivity during hand coordinated joint attention

Autistic young people adaptively use gaze to facilitate joint attention during multi-gestural dyadic interactions

Gaze cues (repeatedly) fail to influence person evaluation.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About