Although the supplementary eye field (SEF) has been implicated in the control of head movements associated with gaze shifts, there is no direct evidence that SEF plays a role in the generation of head movements independent of gaze. If the SEF does, varying the duration of stimulation should selectively alter the head-movement kinematics during the postgaze-shift period. The duration of the stim...

Animals selectively direct their visual attention toward relevant aspects of their environments. They can shift their attention using a combination of eye, head and body movements. While we have a growing understanding of eye and head movements in mammals, we know little about these processes in birds. We therefore measured the eye and head movements of freely behaving Indian peafowl (Pavo cris...

One important behavioral role for head movements is to assist in the redirection of gaze. However, primates also frequently make head movements that do not involve changes in the line of sight. Virtually nothing is known about the neural basis of these head-only movements. In the present study, single unit extracellular activity was recorded from the superior colliculus while monkeys performed ...

In this chapter I’m going to discuss the issues that arise when we design automatic spoken dialogue systems that can use not only voice, but also facial and head movements and hand gestures to communicate with humans. For the most part I will concentrate on the generation side of the problem—that is, building systems that can speak, move their faces and heads and make hand gestures. As with mos...

Sleepiness in working life is critical and strongly associated to work related accidents. The relationship between sleepiness and head movements is poorly investigated. The pattern of head movements over time was investigated in a laboratory study with ten subjects either sleep-deprived or rested. Head movements were obtained by an inclinometer placed on the subject's forehead, and the recordin...

Head movements during magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings may lead to inaccurate localization of brain activity. This can be particularly problematic for studies with children. We quantified head movements in 8- to 12-year-old children performing a cognitive task and examined how the movements affected source estimation. Each child was presented auditory word stimuli in five 4-min runs. The...

Humans adjust gaze by eye, head, and body movements. Certain stimulus properties are therefore elevated at the gaze center, but the relative contribution of eye-in-head and head-in-world movements to this selection process is unknown. Gaze- and head-centered videos recorded with a wearable device (EyeSeeCam) during free exploration are reanalyzed with respect to responses of a face-detection al...

PURPOSE There is little information regarding the characteristics of head movements during reading. This study was undertaken to investigate horizontal and vertical head movements during two different reading tasks. METHODS Head and eye movements were monitored with an infrared pupil and head tracker in 15 subjects during repeated reading of text from an A4-sized card and a card 90 degrees wi...

Prosodic structure is a grammatical component that serves multiple functions in the production, comprehension and acquisition of language. Prosodic boundaries are critical for the understanding of the nature of the prosodic structure of language, and important progress has been made in the past decades in illuminating their properties. We first review recent prosodic boundary research from the ...

Very young infants orient overtly with eye and head movements to salient events in their visual environments, but those events rarely occur in the absence of competing visual stimuli. Two different models of how this kind of orienting is related to number and distribution of elements in the stimulus field were tested with infants across the age range from 2 to 5 months in four experiments. A se...