Eye Synchrony: A Method to Capture Mutual and Joint Attention in Social Eye Movements

Area of Science:

• Social Interaction Analysis
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Gaze behavior is crucial for social interaction, enabling shared attention through eye contact.
• Interpersonal synchrony in various signals is increasingly recognized, but eye synchrony outside labs remains understudied.
• Existing methods often require controlled laboratory settings, limiting naturalistic interaction analysis.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel methodology for analyzing eye synchrony in naturalistic dyadic face-to-face interactions.
• To operationalize shared attention via joint gazes and eye contact during verbal exchanges.
• To enable the estimation of interlocutors' synchrony dynamics in real-world settings.

Main Methods:

• Utilized time series of gaze behavior data captured by mobile eye-tracking devices.
• Applied windowed cross-correlations to analyze gaze patterns.
• Employed surrogate testing (Surrogate Synchrony - SUSY) to determine effect sizes for single interactions.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated proof-of-concept for the developed eye synchrony analysis method.
• Showcased the ability of SUSY to provide effect sizes for individual interactions, integrating nomothetic and idiographic research.
• The exemplary dataset confirmed the feasibility of the approach in naturalistic settings.

Conclusions:

• The presented methodology offers a viable approach to study eye synchrony in real-world social interactions.
• SUSY facilitates the investigation of generalizable hypotheses about gaze synchrony and its psychological correlates.
• The method supports qualitative research by enabling effect size determination in single-case studies, with potential applications in psychotherapy and negotiations.