Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Anja Stukenbrock

Joint attention in interaction: Eye tracking based observations on the coordination of gaze practices "in the wild"

Gaze serves a variety of different functions in human interaction. It plays a crucial role in how we mutually attend to one another, jointly orient to visible and invisible phenomena, coordinate our minds and bodies and display understanding to each other. When we refer to visible phenomena in our surroundings, we use deictic expressions (e.g. "here", "there", "this") and gestures to share attention with our co-participants.

My paper explores gaze practices used by participants in concert with speech and embodied resources to establish joint attention on visible phenomena in everyday settings. Methodologically situated within the framework of multimodal conversation analysis where video recording is used, the study strives to overcome gaze-related precision problems in video by using eye tracking devices and thus a technology exclusively applied in highly controlled experimental settings, mostly stationary, with the participants seated. In contrast, my study pushes the mobility factor of this technology to its limits by taking eye tracking glasses out of the laboratory to record naturally occurring social interaction "in the wild". Here, joint attention appears to be an interactional accomplishment of participants on the move in a world of fleeting phenomena that may be noticed, pointed out, gestured at and shared, or left passing by.