Shared Gaze Visualizations in Collaborative Interactions: Past, Present and Future

The past decade has witnessed a growing interest for using dual eye tracking to understand and support remote collaboration, especially with studies that have established the benefits of displaying gaze information for small groups. While this line of work is promising, we lack a consistent framework that researchers can use to organize and categorize studies on the effect of shared gaze on social interactions. There exists a wide variety of terminology and methods for describing attentional alignment; researchers have used diverse techniques for designing gaze visualizations. The settings studied range from real-time peer collaboration to asynchronous viewing of eye-tracking video of an expert providing explanations. There has not been a conscious effort to synthesize and understand how these different approaches, techniques and applications impact the effectiveness of shared gaze visualizations (SGVs). In this paper, we summarize the related literature and the benefits of SGVs for collaboration, describe important terminology as well as appropriate measures for the dual eye-tracking space and discuss promising directions for future research. As eye-tracking technology becomes more ubiquitous, there is pressing need to develop a consistent approach to evaluation and design of SGVs. The present paper makes a first and significant step in this direction.

Shared Gaze Fails to Improve Team Visual Monitoring

Objective The aim was to test the value of shared gaze as a way to improve team performance in a visual monitoring task. Background Teams outperform individuals in monitoring tasks, but fall short of achievable levels. Shared-gaze displays offer a potential method of improving team efficiency. Within a shared-gaze arrangement, operators collaborate on a visual task, and each team member’s display includes a cursor to represent the other teammates’ point of regard. Past work has suggested that shared gaze allows operators to better communicate and coordinate their attentional scanning in a visual search task. The current experiments sought to replicate and extend earlier findings of inefficient team performance in a visual monitoring task, and asked whether shared gaze would improve team efficiency. Method Participants performed a visual monitoring task framed as a sonar operation. Displays were matrices of luminance patches varying in intensity. The participants’ task was to monitor for occasional critical signals, patches of high luminance. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants performed the task independently, or working as teams. In Experiment 2, teams of two participants performed the task with or without shared-gaze displays. Results In Experiment 1, teams detected more critical signals than individuals, but were statistically inefficient; detection rates were lower than predicted by a control model that assumed pairs of operators searching in isolation. In Experiment 2, shared gaze failed to increase target detection rates. Conclusion and application Operators collaborate inefficiently in visual monitoring tasks, and shared gaze does not improve their performance.

Animal Eyes: Gazing at the Animal in Video Games

Encounters with animals are common in video games, where they are often included to add realism to the gameworld. Encounters with animal subjectivity, however, are not. The anthropocentric nature of video games means that animals are often environmental objects, and sometimes resources, but only occasionally characters, and rarely protagonists. As a consequence, there is no encounter with the animal presence, and often no shared gaze: The look of the animal is instead transformed into something wholly antagonistic (such as in Horizon Zero Dawn), wholly submissive (as in Far Cry Primal) or absent entirely (Red Dead Redemption). Even when video game animals are designed with the intention of “appreciating” the animals, the privileging of their panoptic human spectators just as often results in their objectification.

How Dogs Domesticated

The dog, Canis familiaris, has classical domestication attributes, possibly derived from selection for tameness, except one: the capacity to share a long gaze (30+ seconds) with a human. All dog breeds have this capacity, even puppies prior to human socialization. No other domesticate can do so. Only Great Apes, among over 5000 mammals, can. Shared gazing replaces cortisol-based fight/flight hormone response with an oxytocin governed phobia/philia response. It involves mutations in neural hormone receptors, iris visibility, periorbital muscle control, and mate selection. Shared gazing contradicts domestication induced adolescent behavior fixation, as it requires apparent cognitive control of distractions. Domestication usually amplifies and suppresses existing traits. Humans still cannot induce complex beneficial mutations in animals. Therefore shared gazing likely evolved prior to domestication. Recent genomics evidence, comparing contemporary dogs and other canids, as well as sequencing archaeological canid remains, pushes back dog origins between 20,000 and 200,000 years BP. No evidence of human domestication efforts exists prior to 15,000 years BP. I review the genetic, archaeological, and experimental evidence of dog origins, which reveal tension in a dominant explanatory paradigm. Many researchers assume dogs evolved only through artificial selection. Evidence of ancient origins requires positing a far more ancient domestication activity than seems reasonable, or else reframing (or dismissing) evidence. Neither is necessary if 1) dogs evolved prior to domestication, 2) this pre-domesticated canid had a shared-gaze capacity, and 3) during the period of hunter-gatherer population increase, this capacity was exploited because it helped humans develop emotional attachment skills. Hunter-gatherer reports suggests the shared-gaze is key to canid domestication. Others have suggested this dog capacity might be a factor in their domestication. This paper's hypothesis makes it central to the process.