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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms
Semantic Drivers of Gaze in Individuals With and Without Autism During Dyadic Conversation
Katerina M Simkova1, Amanda J. Haskins2, Ben Chamberlain Zivsak1, Moshe Poliak3, Thomas Hikaru Clark3, Tamar I Regev3, Edward Gibson3, Caroline E. Robertson1; 1Dartmouth College, 2University of California, San Diego, 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Presenter: Katerina M Simkova
What governs when we look at other people during a conversation? Emerging evidence suggests that the pragmatic demands of social interaction play a critical role, but it remains unclear how the semantic content of speech modulates gaze in real-time. Here, we test whether the content of individuals’ speech predicts their moment-to-moment fixations on a conversational partner’s face, and whether this differs between individuals with and without autism. We quantified semantic content using speech embeddings and aligned it with time-resolved eye-tracking data collected during a dyadic conversation. We found that externally oriented, factual speech increases face fixation, relative to internally oriented, reflective speech, and that this semantic modulation was stronger in autism. These findings demonstrate that semantic content plays a key role in shaping social gaze behaviour during conversation.
Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations