Making visual contact is an integral part of social communication, but a new study reveals that choosing as and when Doing doing is equally important to understand and respond to others.
“We Found That’s Not Just How Often Subtone Looks AT You, Or If They Look at You Last In A Sequence of Eye Movements, But The Context of Eye Movements That Makes That Behaviour Appear Communicative and Release,” Say Dr Nathan Caruana, to Cognitive Neuroscient at Australia’s Flinders University and Lead Author of The study Posted in the magazine Royal Society Open Science.
The findings could allow researchers to design virtual avatars and social robots that are capable of natural and intuitive interactions with humans. It could also help support people better to communicate with each other.
“These subtle signals are the basic components of the social connection,” says Caruana.
“By understanding them better, we can create technologies and training that help people connect more clearly and with confidence.”
Caruana and his colleagues asked 137 participants to complete a virtual activity in which they were commissioned to decide whether a simulated avatar was inspecting or requesting help to recover, one of the 3 objects by their side. The only clues to inform this decision were the look of the virtual partner, which jumped between the participant and the object in several sequences and durations.
They discovered that people were more likely to interpret the gaze as a call to help when it was done in a specific sequence: look at an object, make visual contact and then look back at the same object. “The fascinating thing is that people responded in the same way that the behavior of the look is observed from a human or a robot,” adds Caruana.
The authors suggest that the “repetitive visualization of the avoided gaze, in combination with visual contact, can indicate intentionality or interest in a potential place for joint attention.”
However, it is not clear if this is also the case without the use of visual contact: “That is, when an agent looks repeatedly an object before and after looking at another object, instead of making visual contact,” the authors write.
“The future work that manipulates these perceptual factors separately of the repetition of the eye avoided, with and without visual contact, would help completely elucidate its independent and shared influence on the perceptions of the communicative intention.”
“Our findings have helped decode one of our most instinctive behaviors and how it can be used to build better connections, whether they are talking to a teammate, a robot or someone who communicates differently,” says Caruana.
“It aligns with our previous work that shows that the human brain is widely tuned to see and respond to social information and that humans are prepared to communicate and effectively understand robots and virtual agents if they show the nonverbal gestures that we are used to navigating in our daily interactions with other people.
“Understanding how visual contact works could improve nonverbal communication training in high pressure environments, such as sports, defense and noisy workplaces. It could also support people who depend largely on visual signals, such as those who have audition or autistic problems.”
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