When eye see you: Gaze and joint attention in human interaction

Abstract

Gaze behavior provides fundamental mechanisms for sharing mental states such as goals and desires and helps to ground communicative content. Responding to or leading someone's gaze to a location or an object of interest thus may result in a situation of joint attention -- a referential triad between two individuals and an entity in the environment. Since people often look at what they attend to and where they intend to act, joint attention is considered fundamental to an understanding of other minds and the interaction with them. This workshop aims to explore how traditionally separate research areas such as social cognition/neuroscience, psycholinguistics, human-computer interaction and developmental psychology contribute to an understanding of the general phenomenon of gaze-following and joint attention from different perspectives -- and how these fields can benefit and learn from each other, e.g. by comparing different approaches and methodologies.


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