Visual attention during conversation: an investigation using real-world stimuli.

This research investigates how people visually attend to each other in realistic settings. In particular, I explore how people move their eyes to attend to speakers during social situations. I examine which signalling cues are crucial to social interactions and how they work in conjunction to enable successful conversation in humans. Furthermore, a main aim of this research is to explore eye movement when participants are live or are third-party observers. Overall, using a range of techniques, the research has demonstrated the benefit of using both audio and visual cues to guide conversation following; how viewing the eyes of the speakers and their spatial location facilitates this; as well as an investigation of social attention in those with traits of disorders. Moreover, a key finding of the thesis is demonstrating the similarities in live eye-movements and third-party observations. Overall, the thesis offers a comprehensive account of which factors attract visual attention to speakers and facilitate conversation following.