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 assortment 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