Dataset Information

Gaze and body cues interplay during interactive requests.

ABSTRACT: Although observing other's gaze and body movements provides a crucial source of information to successfully interact with other people, it remains unclear whether observers weigh differently these cues and whether the convergence of gaze and body's directions determines facilitation effects. Here we aim to shed more light on this issue by testing the reliance upon these cues from both a behavioral and a neurophysiological perspective in a social interactive context. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the convergence between the direction of an actor's upper limb movement and gaze direction while he attempts to socially interact with the participants observing the scene. We determined the direction of gaze as well as the duration of participants' ocular fixations during the observation of the scene. In Experiment 2, we measured and correlated the effect of the body/gaze manipulation on corticospinal excitability and on the readiness to interact-a disposition to engage in social situations. Eye-tracking data revealed that participants fixated chiefly the actor's head when his hand and gaze directions were divergent. Possibly a strategy to disambiguate the scene. Whereas participants mainly fixated the actor's hand when he performed an interactive request toward the participants. From a neurophysiological point of view, the more participants felt involved in the interaction, the lower was motor preparation in the muscle potentially needed to fulfill the actor's request. We contend that social contexts are more likely to elicit motor preparation compared to non-social ones, and that muscular inhibition is a necessary mechanism in order to prevent unwanted overt reactions during action observation tasks.

SUBMITTER: Betti S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6802846 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Gaze and body cues interplay during interactive requests.

Betti Sonia S Castiello Umberto U Guerra Silvia S Granziol Umberto U Zani Giovanni G Sartori Luisa L

PloS one 20191021 10

Although observing other's gaze and body movements provides a crucial source of information to successfully interact with other people, it remains unclear whether observers weigh differently these cues and whether the convergence of gaze and body's directions determines facilitation effects. Here we aim to shed more light on this issue by testing the reliance upon these cues from both a behavioral and a neurophysiological perspective in a social interactive context. In Experiment 1, we manipulat ...[more]

PMID: 31634344

Similar Datasets

Project description:Observing others' gaze is most informative during social encounters between humans: We can learn about potentially salient objects in the shared environment, infer others' mental states and detect their communicative intentions. We almost automatically follow the gaze of others in order to check the relevance of the target of the other's attention. This phenomenon called gaze cueing can be conceptualized as a triadic interaction involving a gaze initiator, a gaze follower and a gaze target, i.e., an object or person of interest in the environment. Gaze cueing can occur as "gaze pointing" with a communicative or "social" intention by the initiator, telling the observer that she/he is meant to follow, or as an incidental event, in which the observer follows spontaneously without any intention of the observed person. Here, we investigate which gaze cues let an observer ascribe a social intention to the observed person's gaze and whether and to which degree previous eye contact in combination with an object fixation contributes to this ascription. We varied the orientation of the starting position of gaze toward the observer and the orientation of the end position of a lateral gaze shift. In two experiments participants had to infer from the gaze behavior either mere approach ("the person looked at me") vs. a social ("the person wanted to show me something") or a social vs. a private motivation ("the person was interested in something"). Participants differentially attributed either approach behavior, a social, or a private intention to the agent solely based on the passive observation of the two specific gaze cues of start and end position. While for the attribution of privately motivated behavior, participants relied solely on the end position of the gaze shift, the social interpretation of the observed behavior depended additionally upon initial eye contact. Implications of these results for future social gaze and social cognition research in general are discussed.

Project description:BackgroundShifts in eye gaze communicate social information that allows people to respond to another's behavior, interpret motivations driving behavior, and anticipate subsequent behavior. Understanding the social communicative nature of gaze shifts requires the ability to link eye movements and mental state information about objects in the world. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical sensitivity to eye gaze cues, which impacts social communication and relationships. We evaluated whether reduced visual attention to faces explains this difficulty in ASD.MethodsWe employed eye-tracking technology to measure visual attention to faces and gazed-at objects in a 4-alternative forced choice paradigm in adolescents with ASD and typically developing (TD) adolescents. Participants determined the target object that an actor was looking at in ecologically rich scenes. We controlled for group differences in task engagement and data quality.ResultsIn the Gaze Following task, adolescents with ASD were relatively impaired (Cohen's d = 0.63) in the ability to identify the target object. In contrast to predictions, both groups exhibited comparable fixation durations to faces and target objects. Among both groups, individuals who looked longer at the target objects, but not faces, performed better in the task. Finally, among the ASD group, parent SSIS-Social Skills ratings were positively associated with performance on the Gaze Following task. In the Gaze Perception task, there was a similar pattern of results, which provides internal replication of the findings that visual attention to faces is not related to difficulty interpreting eye gaze cues. Together, these findings indicate that adolescents with ASD are capable of following gaze, but have difficulty linking gaze shifts with mental state information.LimitationsAdditional work is necessary to determine whether these findings generalize to individuals across the full autism spectrum. New paradigms that manipulate component processes of eye gaze processing need to be tested to confirm these interpretations.ConclusionsReduced visual attention to faces does not appear to contribute to atypical processing of eye gaze cues among adolescents with ASD. Instead, the difficulty for individuals with ASD is related to understanding the social communicative aspects of eye gaze information, which may not be extracted from visual cues alone.

Project description:BackgroundThe ability to follow one another's gaze plays an important role in our social cognition; especially when we synchronously perform tasks together. We investigate how gaze cues can improve performance in a simple coordination task (i.e., the mirror game), whereby two players mirror each other's hand motions. In this game, each player is either a leader or follower. To study the effect of gaze in a systematic manner, the leader's role is played by a robotic avatar. We contrast two conditions, in which the avatar provides or not explicit gaze cues that indicate the next location of its hand. Specifically, we investigated (a) whether participants are able to exploit these gaze cues to improve their coordination, (b) how gaze cues affect action prediction and temporal coordination, and (c) whether introducing active gaze behavior for avatars makes them more realistic and human-like (from the user point of view).Methodology/principal findings43 subjects participated in 8 trials of the mirror game. Each subject performed the game in the two conditions (with and without gaze cues). In this within-subject study, the order of the conditions was randomized across participants, and subjective assessment of the avatar's realism was assessed by administering a post-hoc questionnaire. When gaze cues were provided, a quantitative assessment of synchrony between participants and the avatar revealed a significant improvement in subject reaction-time (RT). This confirms our hypothesis that gaze cues improve the follower's ability to predict the avatar's action. An analysis of the pattern of frequency across the two players' hand movements reveals that the gaze cues improve the overall temporal coordination across the two players. Finally, analysis of the subjective evaluations from the questionnaires reveals that, in the presence of gaze cues, participants found it not only more human-like/realistic, but also easier to interact with the avatar.Conclusion/significanceThis work confirms that people can exploit gaze cues to predict another person's movements and to better coordinate their motions with their partners, even when the partner is a computer-animated avatar. Moreover, this study contributes further evidence that implementing biological features, here task-relevant gaze cues, enable the humanoid robotic avatar to appear more human-like, and thus increase the user's sense of affiliation.

Dataset Information

Gaze and body cues interplay during interactive requests.

Publications

Gaze and body cues interplay during interactive requests.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets