Gaze Following

What does a child’s ability to look where another is looking tell us about his or her early cognitive development? What does this ability—or lack thereof—tell us about a child’s language development, understanding of other’s intentions, and the emergence of autism? This volume assembles several years of research on the processing of gaze information and its relationship to early social-cognitive development in infants spanning many age groups. Gaze-Following examines how humans and non-human primates use another individual’s direction of gaze to learn about the world around them. The chapters throughout this volume address development in areas including joint attention, early non-verbal social interactions, language development, and theory of mind understanding. Offering novel insights regarding the significance of gaze-following, the editors present research from a neurological and a behavioral perspective, and compare children with and without pervasive developmental disorders. Scholars in the areas of cognitive development specifically, and developmental science more broadly, as well as clinical psychologists will be interested in the intriguing research presented in this volume.

Although we routinely take our vision to be veridical representations of reality, in actuality we choose (albeit unwittingly) or construct what we see. By movements of the eyes, the direction of our gaze, we create meaning. The author offers a reformulation of perception and its neural underpinnings, focusing on the active nature of perception. In his investigation of active perception and its brain mechanisms, he offers the gaze as the principal paradigm for perception. He discusses the dynamic and constrained nature of perception; the complex information processing at the level of the retina; the active nature of vision; the intensive nature of representations; the gaze of others as visual stimulus; and the intentionality of vision and consciousness.

Gaze in Human-Robot Communication is a volume collecting recent research studying gaze behaviour in human-robot interaction (HRI). The selected articles draw inspiration from related research into gaze in human-human interaction in fields ranging from ethnography to neuroscience. The major themes of these articles include: the experimental investigation of human responses to robot gaze, the investigation of the impact of coordinating gaze acts with speech, and the development of hardware and software technologies for enabling robot gaze. This volume provides an excellent introduction to the depth and breadth of this growing research area in HRI. The highly interdisciplinary nature of the work presented should make it of interest both to robotics researchers and to researchers from other fields with an interest in the role of gaze in communication. Originally published in Interaction Studies Vol. 14:3 (2013).

In this innovative book on autism and gaze from a multimodal interaction perspective, Terhi Korkiakangas examines the role of gaze in everyday situations, asking why eye contact matters, and considering the implications of this crucial question for autism. Since persons on the autism spectrum tend to use it differently and might not engage in eye contact in social situations, gaze is a crucial topic for understanding autism, yet we know surprisingly little about this topic in a real-world context, beyond psychological experiments and the research lab. Drawing on her research on authentic video-recorded social interactions, Korkiakangas shows how a multimodal interaction perspective can shed new light on gaze: what an instance of gaze does, and when, why, and for whom gaze ‘matters’, from both children on the autism spectrum and their social partners’ perspective, including teachers and parents. Grounded in the interactional tradition of conversation analysis, the multimodal interaction perspective offers a major contribution to our understanding of autism by examining communication beyond talk and linguistic resources. Communication, Gaze and Autism considers both mutual gaze and gaze aversion during talk or silence, alongside facial expressions, gestures, and other body movements, to understand what gaze is used for, and to rethink ‘eye contact’. The book includes a methodological introduction, practical tools for doing multimodal interaction research, and empirical findings. It also considers the voices of those people on the autism spectrum from the blogosphere, who suggest that eye contact has less significance for them and represents a communication difference, rather than a deficit. This book is designed for anyone with an academic, professional or personal interest in autism. It will particularly appeal to senior undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of communication, social interaction and autism.

This volume explores the development as early as infancy of social cognitive abilities, including prelinguistic communicative and monitoring abilities hitherto only suspected. For developmental psychologists and early childhood educators.

In The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher maps one portion of the historicized, gendered territory of what Nancy K. Miller calls the "gaze in representation." Expanding the notion of the gaze in critical discourse, Gallagher situates a number of visual acts within specific historic contexts to reconstruct the wartime female subject. She looks at both the female observer's physical act of seeing - and the refusal to see - for example, a battlefield, a wounded soldier, a torture victim, a national flag, a fashion model, a bombed city, or a wartime hallucination. Interdisciplinary in focus, this book brings together visual (twenty-two illustrations) and literary texts, "high" and "popular" expressive forms, and well-known and lesser-known figures and texts.