55,693 research outputs found
Helping children think: Gaze aversion and teaching
No full textLooking away from an interlocutor's face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults answer challenging arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). However, such `gaze aversion' (GA) is poorly applied by 5-year-old school children (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). In Experiment 1 we trained ten 5-year-old children to use GA while thinking about answers to questions. This trained group performed significantly better on challenging questions compared with 10 controls given no GA training. In Experiment 2 we found significant and monotonic age-related increments in spontaneous use of GA across three cohorts of ten 5-year-old school children (mean ages: 5;02, 5;06 and 5;08). Teaching and encouraging GA during challenging cognitive activity promises to be invaluable in promoting learning, particularly during early primary years
Gaze patterns in turn-taking
No full textOertel C, Wlodarczak M, Edlund J, Wagner P, Gustafson J. Gaze patterns in turn-taking. In: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2012 (INTERSPEECH 2012). Red Hook, NY: Curran; 2013: 2243-2246
Social interaction modifies neural response to gaze shifts
No full textMonitoring gaze shifts is important for social interactions. The direction of gaze can reveal intentions and help to predict future actions. Here we examined whether behavioural and neural responses to gaze shifts were modulated by the social context of the gaze shift in two linked experiments. Two faces were presented, one gazing directly at the subject (the 'social' face) and one with averted gaze (the 'unsocial' face). One face then made a gaze shift that was either towards a visible target ('correct') or towards another location in space ('incorrect'). Both behavioural and neural responses to gaze shifts were modulated by the social context and the goal directedness of the gaze shift. Reaction times were significantly faster in response to 'correct' and 'social' compared with 'incorrect' and 'unsocial' gaze shifts, respectively. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found significantly greater activation in the parieto-frontal attentional network, and in some parts of the posterior superior temporal sulcus, in response to 'incorrect' and 'unsocial' compared with 'incorrect' and 'social' gaze shifts, respectively. Conversely, we found greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus in response to 'correct' and 'social' compared with 'incorrect' and 'unsocial' gaze shifts. This activity may reflect the experience of joint attention associated with these gaze shifts
Investigating speaker gaze and pointing behaviour in human-computer interaction with the `mint.tools` collection
No full textKousidis S, Kennington C, Schlangen D. Investigating speaker gaze and pointing behaviour in human-computer interaction with the `mint.tools` collection. In: Proceedings of Short Papers at SIGdial 2013. 2013
Is anyone looking at me? Direct gaze detection in children with and without autism
No full textAtypical processing of eye contact is one of the significant characteristics of individuals with autism, but the mechanism underlying atypical direct gaze processing is still unclear. This study used a visual search paradigm to examine whether the facial context would affect direct gaze detection in children with autism. Participants were asked to detect target gazes presented among distracters with different gaze directions. The target gazes were either direct gaze or averted gaze, which were either presented alone (Experiment 1) or within facial context (Experiment 2). As with the typically developing children, the children with autism, were faster and more efficient to detect direct gaze than averted gaze, whether or not the eyes were presented alone or within faces. In addition, face inversion distorted efficient direct gaze detection in typically developing children, but not in children with autism. These results suggest that children with autism use featural information to detect direct gaze, whereas typically developing children use configural information to detect direct gaze
Spontaneous and cued gaze-following in autism and Williams syndrome
No full textBackground: From a young age the typical development of social functioning relies upon the allocation of attention to socially relevant information, which in turn allows experience at processing such information and thus enhances social cognition. As such, research has attempted to identify the developmental processes that are derailed in some neuro-developmental disorders that impact upon social functioning. Williams syndrome (WS) and Autism are disorders of development that are characterized by atypical yet divergent social phenotypes and atypicalities of attention to people. Methods: We used eye tracking to explore how individuals with WS and Autism attended to, and subsequently interpreted, an actor’s eye gaze cue within a social scene. Images were presented for three seconds, initially with an instruction simply to look at the picture. The images were then shown again, with the participant asked to identify the object being looked at. Allocation of eye-gaze in each condition was analyzed by ANOVA and accuracy of identification was compared with t-tests. Results: Participants with WS allocated more gaze time to face and eyes than their matched controls both with and without being asked to identify the item being looked at; while participants with Autism spent less time on face and eyes in both conditions. When cued to follow gaze, participants with WS increased gaze to the correct targets, while those with Autism looked more at the face and eyes but did not increase gaze to the correct targets, while continuing to look much more than their controls at implausible targets. Both groups identified fewer objects than their controls. Conclusions: The atypicalities found are likely to be entwined with the deficits shown in interpreting social cognitive cues from the images. WS and Autism are characterised by atypicalities of social attention that impact upon socio-cognitive expertise but importantly the type of atypicality is syndrome-specific
The development and neural basis of referential gaze perception
No full textInfants are sensitive to the referential information conveyed by others’ eye gaze, which could be one of the developmental foundations of theory of mind. To investigate the neural correlates of gaze–object relations, we recorded ERPs from adults and 9-month-old infants while they watched scenes containing gaze shifts either towards or away from the location of a preceding object. In adults, object-incongruent gaze shifts elicited enhanced ERP amplitudes over the occipito-temporal area (N330). In infants, a similar posterior ERP component (N290) was greater for object-incongruent gaze shifts, which suggests that by the age of 9 months infants encode referential information of gaze in a similar way to adults. In addition, in infants we observed an early frontal ERP component (anterior N200), which showed higher amplitude in response to the perception of object-congruent gaze shifts. This component may reflect fast-track processing of socially relevant information, such as the detection of communicative or informative situations, and could form a developmental foundation for attention sharing, social learning and theory of mind
Joint perception: gaze and social context
No full textWe found that the way people looked at images was influenced by their belief that others were looking too. If participants believed that an unseen other person was also looking at what they could see, it shifted the balance of their gaze between negative and positive images. The direction of this shift depended upon whether participants thought that later they would be compared against the other person or would be collaborating with them. Changes in the social context influenced both gaze and memory processes, and were not due just to participants' belief that they are looking at the same images, but also to the belief that they are doing the same task. We believe that the phenomenon of joint perception reveals the pervasive and subtle effect of social context upon cognitive and perceptual processes
Interpreting Situated Dialogue Utterances: an Update Model that Uses Speech, Gaze, and Gesture Information
No full textKennington C, Kousidis S, Schlangen D. Interpreting Situated Dialogue Utterances: an Update Model that Uses Speech, Gaze, and Gesture Information. In: Proceedings of SIGdial 2013. 2013
Does gaze direction modulate facial expression processing in children with autism spectrum disorder?
No full textTwo experiments investigated whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) integrate relevant communicative signals, such as gaze direction, when decoding a facial expression. In Experiment 1, typically developing children (9–14 years old; n = 14) were faster at detecting a facial expression accompanying a gaze direction with a congruent motivational tendency (i.e., an avoidant facial expression with averted eye gaze) than those with an incongruent motivational tendency. Children with ASD (9–14 years old; n = 14) were not affected by the gaze direction of facial stimuli. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, which presented only the eye region of the face to typically developing children (n = 10) and children with ASD (n = 10). These results demonstrated that children with ASD do not encode and/or integrate multiple communicative signals based on their affective or motivational tendency
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