Publications
Publication details [#43820]
Gullberg, Marianne and Kenneth Holmqvist. 2006. What speakers do and what addressees look at: Visual attention to gestures in human interaction live and on video. Pragmatics & Cognition 14 (1) : 53–82.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc
Annotation
This study investigates whether addressees visually attend to speakers’ gestures in interaction and whether attention is modulated by changes in social setting and display size. A live face-to-face setting is compared to two video conditions. In all conditions, the face dominates as a fixation target and only a minority of gestures draw fixations. The social and size parameters affect gaze mainly when combined and in the opposite direction from the predicted with fewer gestures fixated on video than live. Gestural holds and speakers’ gaze at their own gestures reliably attract addressees’ fixations in all conditions. The attraction force of holds is unaffected by changes in social and size parameters, suggesting a bottom-up response, whereas speaker-fixated gestures draw significantly less attention in both video conditions, suggesting a social effect for overt gaze-following and visual joint attention. The study provides and validates a video-based paradigm enabling further experimental but ecologically valid explorations of cross-modal information processing.