scholarly journals Attentional shift by eye gaze requires joint attention: Eye gaze cues are unique to shift attention1

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
NOBUYUKI KAWAI
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (8) ◽  
pp. 2068-2083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Caruana ◽  
Kiley Seymour ◽  
Jon Brock ◽  
Robyn Langdon

This study investigated social cognition in schizophrenia using a virtual reality paradigm to capture the dynamic processes of evaluating and responding to eye gaze as an intentional communicative cue. A total of 21 patients with schizophrenia and 21 age-, gender-, and IQ-matched healthy controls completed an interactive computer game with an on-screen avatar that participants believed was controlled by an off-screen partner. On social trials, participants were required to achieve joint attention by correctly interpreting and responding to gaze cues. Participants also completed non-social trials in which they responded to an arrow cue within the same task context. While patients and controls took equivalent time to process communicative intent from gaze shifts, patients made significantly more errors than controls when responding to the directional information conveyed by gaze, but not arrow, cues. Despite no differences in response times to gaze cues between groups, patients were significantly slower than controls when responding to arrow cues. This is the opposite pattern of results previously observed in autistic adults using the same task and suggests that, despite general impairments in attention orienting or oculomotor control, patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a facilitation effect when responding to communicative gaze cues. Findings indicate a hyper-responsivity to gaze cues of communicative intent in schizophrenia. The possible effects of self-referential biases when evaluating gaze direction are discussed, as are clinical implications.


2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew P. Bayliss ◽  
Giuseppe di Pellegrino ◽  
Steven P. Tipper

Observing a face with averted eyes results in a reflexive shift of attention to the gazed-at location. Here we present results that show that this effect is weaker in males than in females (Experiment 1). This result is predicted by the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism (Baron-Cohen, 2003), which suggests that males in the normal population should display more autism-like traits than females (e.g., poor joint attention). Indeed, participants′ scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Stott, Bolton, & Goodyear, 2001) negatively correlated with cueing magnitude. Furthermore, exogenous orienting did not differ between the sexes in two peripheral cueing experiments (Experiments 2a and 2b). However, a final experiment showed that using non-predictive arrows instead of eyes as a central cue also revealed a large gender difference. This demonstrates that reduced orienting from central cues in males generalizes beyond gaze cues. These results show that while peripheral cueing is equivalent in the male and female brains, the attention systems of the two sexes treat noninformative symbolic cues very differently.


2020 ◽  
pp. 026765831989682
Author(s):  
Dato Abashidze ◽  
Kim McDonough ◽  
Yang Gao

Recent research that explored how input exposure and learner characteristics influence novel L2 morphosyntactic pattern learning has exposed participants to either text or static images rather than dynamic visual events. Furthermore, it is not known whether incorporating eye gaze cues into dynamic visual events enhances dual pattern learning. Therefore, this exploratory eye-tracking study examined whether eye gaze cues during dynamic visual events facilitate novel L2 pattern learning. University students ( n = 72) were exposed to 36 training videos with two dual novel morphosyntactic patterns in pseudo-Georgian: completed events ( bich-ma kocn-ul gogoit, ‘boy kissed girl’) and ongoing actions ( bich-su kocn-ar gogoit, ‘boy is kissing girl’). They then carried out an immediate test with 24 items using the same vocabulary words, followed by a generalization test with 24 items created from new vocabulary words. Results indicated that learners who received the eye gaze cues scored significantly higher on the immediate test and relied on the verb cues more than on the noun cues. A post-hoc analysis of eye-movement data indicated that the gaze cues elicited longer looks to the correct images. Findings are discussed in relation to visual cues and novel morphosyntactic pattern learning.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 635-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis R. Manssuer ◽  
Mark V. Roberts ◽  
Steven P. Tipper

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melis Çetinçelik ◽  
Caroline F. Rowland ◽  
Tineke M. Snijders

Eye gaze is a ubiquitous cue in child–caregiver interactions, and infants are highly attentive to eye gaze from very early on. However, the question of why infants show gaze-sensitive behavior, and what role this sensitivity to gaze plays in their language development, is not yet well-understood. To gain a better understanding of the role of eye gaze in infants' language learning, we conducted a broad systematic review of the developmental literature for all studies that investigate the role of eye gaze in infants' language development. Across 77 peer-reviewed articles containing data from typically developing human infants (0–24 months) in the domain of language development, we identified two broad themes. The first tracked the effect of eye gaze on four developmental domains: (1) vocabulary development, (2) word–object mapping, (3) object processing, and (4) speech processing. Overall, there is considerable evidence that infants learn more about objects and are more likely to form word–object mappings in the presence of eye gaze cues, both of which are necessary for learning words. In addition, there is good evidence for longitudinal relationships between infants' gaze following abilities and later receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, many domains (e.g., speech processing) are understudied; further work is needed to decide whether gaze effects are specific to tasks, such as word–object mapping or whether they reflect a general learning enhancement mechanism. The second theme explored the reasons why eye gaze might be facilitative for learning, addressing the question of whether eye gaze is treated by infants as a specialized socio-cognitive cue. We concluded that the balance of evidence supports the idea that eye gaze facilitates infants' learning by enhancing their arousal, memory, and attentional capacities to a greater extent than other low-level attentional cues. However, as yet, there are too few studies that directly compare the effect of eye gaze cues and non-social, attentional cues for strong conclusions to be drawn. We also suggest that there might be a developmental effect, with eye gaze, over the course of the first 2 years of life, developing into a truly ostensive cue that enhances language learning across the board.


2011 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna E. West

Children's early development of demonstrative use emanates directly from indexical gestures, namely, eye gaze, pointing, prehensile reaching, and giving exchanges. These indexical gestures become social in that they are joint attentional, and mark the inception of deictic use. Although children's deictic use draws upon index as a directional and social phenomenon, early uses of index alone do not deliver any semantic/lexical/symbolic determinants to the mix. The distinctive premise here is that deictics, especially demonstratives, are not merely social, but symbolic from a Peircian perspective, especially in light of developmental findings (West 1986, 1987, 2010; Tanz 2009) indicating an acquisitional pattern of non-contrastive to contrastive uses of "this" and "that" from 3;0–4;9. While initial non-contrastive uses of demonstratives are directional and/or social, contrastive use after 3;0 requires apprehension of symbolic role taking/role shifting. In addition to delivering the indexical and/or social, deictic indicators must implicitly refer to a class (Nunberg 1993, 1995), e.g., near/far objects from speaker's perspective in the case of demonstratives, and must ultimately have the potential to contrast objects/places with respect to distinctive points of orientation. These components together illustrate how mastery of deictic indicators is both a socio-pragmatic and semantic enterprise. In addition to indexing objects and securing joint attention with gesture, deixis requires semiotic and semantically based orientational competencies to shift perspectives and speech situation roles.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Gregory ◽  
Klaus Kessler

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults make limited use of social cues as compared to younger adults. This has been investigated by testing the influence of gaze cues on attentional processes, with findings showing significantly smaller gaze cuing effects for older than younger adults. Here we aimed to investigate whether this would also result in age related differences in the influence of gaze cues on working memory. We therefore tested the effects of gaze cues from realistic human avatars on working memory across two experiments using dynamic head turns and more subtle eye gaze movements. Results demonstrated that for both older and younger adults, gaze cues influenced working memory processes, though there were some important differences related to the nature of the cue. Overall, we provide important evidence that sharing attention benefits cognition across the lifespan.


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