Confidential Interaction using Eye-Contact (CUE)
In a crowded room you cannot escape being observed but you want to discreetly direct your partner’s attention towards an object of interest. To do this, you cannot use language, and you cannot point. What you can do, though, is to try to use your eyes to lead your partner to the object and thus establish joint attention. However, in a complex environment containing many different objects you have to avoid misunderstandings. This project is concerned with how we avoid or correct misunderstandings when establishing joint attention through the exchange of gaze signals, supplemented by quiet vocal feedback such as ‘‘mmhm’. Depending on the strategies we use, outside observers might have difficulties when trying to follow the interaction. Therefore, we furthermore address how far joint attention interactions are exclusive and which mechanisms enhance this exclusivity, both when participants are not explicitly hiding their attentional focus and when they are attempting to maintain secrecy. We record eye gaze and vocalization in three party face-to-face interaction with mobile eye tracking glasses and synchronized high quality audio and video recordings. Participants are sitting around a table on which an asshttps://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/563096772ortment of objects are placed. One participant (the ‘Sender’) has to convey the position of certain target objects to another participant (the ‘Receiver’) either by using gaze and vocal feedback, just gaze or just vocal feedback. The third participant (the ‘Observer’) observes the interaction and tries to guess the target objects. We assess whether the two interaction partners can influence whether the observer is able to follow the interaction and thus intentionally increase the confidentiality of joint attention. This study will elucidate the role and potential of joint attention in adult everyday life. In addition, results will inform about how gaze signals are integrated with other nonverbal modalities and whether nonverbal communication channels can act as a substitute for each other. The setup used for our investigation will be made available, including comprehensive description and documentation, to benefit other research. To this end, we will endeavor to keep thresholds for the usage of the setup low by building it from scratch from comparably affordable components and using open-source software solutions. Scientifically and methodologically this study will further the field of gaze research, integrating it with multimodal communication and supporting interdisciplinary collaborations.
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 563096772
Prof. Dr. Martine Grice
Institute for Linguistics – Phonetics, University of Cologne
Prof. Dr. Martine Grice is Professor of Phonetics at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Cologne. She served on the board of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Prominence in Language’ for many years and is Principal Investigator of the Key Profile Area ‘Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition’ at the University of Cologne. She is also committed to fair open access publications, serves on the Advisory Board of Language Science Press and is editor of the series Studies in Laboratory Phonology. Her research focuses on intonation, prosody, laboratory phonology and phonological theory. In particular, she investigates intonational categories, their phonic correlates and their functions in perception, pragmatics and interaction. She was also president of the Association for Laboratory Phonology and founded the conference series Phonetics and Phonology in Europe. In addition, she is a member of several international advisory boards and editorial boards, including Journal of Phonetics, Laboratory Phonology and Italian Journal of Linguistics.
Dr. Mathis Jording
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Cologne
Institute of Neuroscience & Medicine (INM-3), Research Centre Jülich
Dr. Mathis Jording is a research assistant at Cologne University Hospital and at the Institute of Neuroscience & Medicine (INM-3) at Forschungszentrum Jülich. He works in the Social Cognition working group at Uniklinik Köln, which investigates social perception and decision-making processes and how they change in psychiatric disorders. His research focuses on social cognition, gaze processing and visual attention, in particular the derivation of social intentions from gaze signals and their role in interpersonal interactions. He is also interested in experimental and physiological methods for investigating social information processing.