Tracking the Leader: Gaze Behavior in Group Interactions
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Updated: Jan 23, 2026

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior
Published on: November 14, 2018
Francesca Capozzi1, Cigdem Beyan2, Antonio Pierro3
1Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 1B1, Canada.
Abstract:
Can social gaze behavior reveal the leader during real-world group interactions? To answer this question, we developed a novel tripartite approach combining (1) computer vision methods for remote gaze estimation, (2) a detailed taxonomy to encode the implicit semantics of multi-party gaze features, and (3) machine learning methods to establish dependencies between leadership and visual behaviors. We found that social gaze behavior distinctively identified group leaders. Crucially, the relationship between leadership and gaze behavior generalized across democratic and autocratic leadership styles under conditions of low and high time-pressure, suggesting that gaze can serve as a general marker of leadership. These findings provide the first direct evidence that group visual patterns can reveal leadership across different social behaviors and validate a new promising method for monitoring natural group interactions.
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