Adaptive eye gaze patterns in interactions with human and artificial agents

Abstract

Efficient collaborations between interacting agents, be they humans, virtual or embodied agents, require mutual recognition of the goal, appropriate sequencing and coordination of each agent's behavior with others, and making predictions from and about the likely behavior of others. Moment-by-moment eye gaze plays an important role in such interaction and collaboration. In light of this, we used a novel experimental paradigm to systematically investigate gaze patterns in both human-human and human-agent interactions. Participants in the study were asked to interact with either another human or an embodied agent in a joint attention task. Fine-grained multimodal behavioral data were recorded including eye movement data, speech, first-person view video, which were then analyzed to discover various behavioral patterns. Those patterns show that human participants are highly sensitive to momentary multimodal behaviors generated by the social partner (either another human or an artificial agent) and they rapidly adapt their gaze behaviors accordingly. Our results from this data-driven approach provide new findings for understanding micro-behaviors in human-human communication which will be critical for the design of artificial agents that can generate human-like gaze behaviors and engage in multimodal interactions with humans.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2012
Source ID
10.1145/2070719.2070726

Entities

People

  • Matthias J Scheutz
  • Paul Schermerhorn
  • Yu Chen

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences
  • Indiana University Bloomington
  • Tufts University

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.