Detecting communicative intent in a computerised test of joint attention

, , ,
1 Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
2 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Sydney, NSW, Australia
3 Perception in Action Research Centre, Sydney, NSW, Australia
4 Centre for Atypical Neurodevelopment, Sydney, NSW, Australia
5 Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
6 Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2410v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Neuroscience, Cognitive Disorders, Human-Computer Interaction
Keywords
joint attention, social interaction, eye-tracking, virtual reality, eye gaze, mentalising
Copyright
© 2016 Caruana et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Caruana N, McArthur G, Woolgar A, Brock J. 2016. Detecting communicative intent in a computerised test of joint attention. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2410v1

Abstract

The successful navigation of social interactions depends on a range of cognitive faculties – including the ability to achieve joint attention with others to share information and experiences. We investigated the influence that intention monitoring processes have on gaze-following response times during joint attention. We employed a virtual reality task in which 16 healthy adults engaged in a collaborative game with a virtual partner to locate a target in a visual array. In the Search task, the virtual partner was programmed to engage in non-communicative gaze shifts in search of the target, establish eye contact, and then display a communicative gaze shift to guide the participant to the target. In the NoSearch task, the virtual partner simply established eye contact and then made a single communicative gaze shift towards the target (i.e., there were no non-communicative gaze shifts in search of the target). Thus, only the Search task required participants to monitor their partner’s communicative intent before responding to joint attention bids. We found that gaze following was significantly slower in the Search task than the NoSearch task. However, the same effect on response times was not observed when participants completed non-social control versions of the Search and NoSearch tasks, in which the avatar’s gaze was replaced by arrow cues. These data demonstrate that the intention monitoring processes involved in differentiating communicative and non-communicative gaze shifts during the Search task had a measureable influence on subsequent joint attention behaviour. The empirical and methodological implications of these findings for the fields of autism and social neuroscience will be discussed.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.

Supplemental Information

Rmarkdown document containing syntax and output for all analyses

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2410v1/supp-1