Looking while speaking and looking while listening in dyadic interactions
I am in my second year as a MSc student in the Experimental Psychology program at McGill. While doing my B.S.H. at Seton Hall University, I worked with Dr. Marianne Lloyd on the effectiveness of stereotype suppression and divided attention in the Memory Lab. Now at McGill, I’d like to turn my focus to the processes involved in perspective taking. More specifically, I am interested in the role of directionality and mentalizing in perspective taking and how they interact. In addition, I am currently working on projects involving gaze behaviour in dyadic interactions using eye tracking.
Looking while speaking and looking while listening in dyadic interactions
Humans show different types of interactive gaze behaviors during social interactions. Here we investigated how gaze interactive behaviors is related to speaking time across a dyadic interaction. Data was extracted from one dyad who wore dual eye tracking eyeglasses while engaging in real-life interactions. Looks to predetermined dynamic regions of interest (dROI; Eyes, Mouth) indexing two possible combinations of unidirectional gaze behaviors were analyzed (Social Referencing and Participation). Overall, each participant’s speech sequence related to their individual social referencing and their partner’s participation via gaze behavior. When participants were speaking, their partner engaged in recurrent looks towards them. When participants were listening, they were repeatedly looking at their partner without being looked back at. Hence, verbal and nonverbal communication are coupled during real-life interactions, with attention selecting the most relevant input at a given time.