UGaze: CUE (Confidential Interactions Using Eye-Contact)

This project is concerned with the various behaviours exhibited by people when non-verbally communicating in confidential versus non-confidential situations, specifically focusing on triadic (three person) interactions. The main behavioural foci being investigated are eye gaze patterns (e.g., joint attention and mutual gaze), head and facial gestures (e.g., head nods, smiling, etc), and closed-mouth non-lexical vocalisations (e.g., ’mhmm’), and how these can (co-)occur in a variety of ways depending on the intended meaning.

Specifically, this is being investigated in face-to-face interactions using mobile eye-tracking glasses and synchronised audio and visual recordings. Participants are sitting around a table on which an assortment of objects are placed. One participant (the Sender) has to convey the position of certain target objects to another participant (the Receiver) either by using gaze and vocal feedback, just gaze, or just vocal feedback. The third participant (the Observer) observes the interaction and tries to guess the target objects.

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The CUE project is a collaboration between the Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital of Cologne and the Institute of Phonetics, University of Cologne, and is part of the interdisciplinary research group CoCo (Cologne group on Conversation in Collaborative and Cooperative Contexts). It is funded by the DFG Schwerpunktprogramm (SPP 2481) Understanding Gaze at the University of Ulm.