In joint visual attention, the robot should not only follow a human’s gaze but also identify the gaze target of the human. We believe that mutual adjustment based on the individuality of the robot is a key to identify the gaze target of the human even if the human decides the target unilaterally. In the identification, mismatches of the gaze target are uncovered. In humans, the mismatches can b...

Studies in human and non-human primates indicate that basic socio-cognitive operations are inherently linked to the power of gaze in capturing reflexively the attention of an observer. Although monkey studies indicate that the automatic tendency to follow the gaze of a conspecific is modulated by the leader-follower social status, evidence for such effects in humans is meager. Here, we used a g...

Gaze is instrumental in coordinating face-to-face social interactions. But little is known about gaze use when social interactions co-occur with other joint activities. We investigated the case of walking while talking. We assessed how gaze gets allocated among various targets in mobile conversations, whether allocation of gaze to other targets affects conversational coordination, and whether r...

Several recent studies showed the effect of eye gaze direction on both instructed and spontaneous imitative behavior, as well as the acquisition of action-effect binding. In particular, direct eye gaze of a model gesturer/talker, compared to averted eye gaze, gives rise to faster gesture imitation and better vocal imitation, and reinforces intersubjective stimulus-effect learning. In an experim...

Gaze estimation error is inherent in head-mounted eye trackers and seriously impacts performance, usability, and user experience of gaze-based interfaces. Particularly in mobile settings, this error varies constantly as users move in front and look at different parts of a display. We envision a new class of gaze-based interfaces that are aware of the gaze estimation error and adapt to it in rea...

Previous use of gaze (eye movement) to improve ASR performance involves shifting language model probability mass towards the subset of the vocabulary whose words are related to a person’s visual attention. Motivated to improve Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) performance in acoustically noisy settings by using information from gaze selectively, we propose a ‘Selective Gaze-contingent ASR’ (SG...

We asked whether previous observations of group interactions modulate subsequent social attention episodes. Participants first completed a learning phase with 2 conditions. In the "leader" condition 1 of 3 identities turned her gaze first, followed by the 2 other faces. In the "follower" condition, 1 of the identities turned her gaze after the 2 other faces had first shifted their gaze. Thus, p...

Previous investigations of gaze processing in autism have demonstrated a pattern of intact and impaired performance. Although individuals with autism are capable of discriminating another's gaze, they fail to interpret gaze direction, especially within the context of sociocommunicative (i.e., mentalistic) interactions. Extending this general line of inquiry, we explored whether typical children...

Primates use gaze cues to follow peer gaze to an object of joint attention. Gaze following of monkeys is largely determined by head or face orientation. We used fMRI in rhesus monkeys to identify brain regions underlying head gaze following and to assess their relationship to the 'face patch' system, the latter being the likely source of information on face orientation. We trained monkeys to lo...

The eye gaze behavior of individuals changes depending on their knowledge and experience of the event occurring in their field of view. In past studies, researchers formulated a hypothesis concerning this dependency on a specific scene and then analyzed the gaze behavior of viewers observing the scene. We depart from this hypothesis-testing paradigm. In this paper, we propose a datamining frame...