Dr Marie-Luise Brandi | Simulating social gaze: A paradigm to study gaze-based social interaction

Gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigms are a useful tool to investigate social interactions in a truly interactive manner. In a newly developed paradigm, video recordings of gaze behaviour from a real person are shown to participant to simulate a realistic gaze-based social interaction, while retaining experimental control. This procedure enables us to systematically manipulate the responsiveness of an interaction partner by controlling different factors such as the direction of gaze, as well as the temporal gaze dynamics within the simulation. Data from two current studies show that 1) the developed paradigm successfully simulates a social interaction with a real person, 2) participants are able to perceive differences in the responsiveness of the simulated interaction partner, and 3) the paradigm evokes responses in neural networks previously implicated for social cognition. Combining such innovative and interactive gaze paradigms with behavioural modelling and fMRI measurements in the future opens up unprecedented ways of characterizing the underlying mechanisms of gaze-based social interaction in healthy participants and patients with disorders of social interaction.

Poster