ITR: Contributions of Eye Movements and Shared Attention to Collaborative Tasks

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During remote collaboration, partners have access to much less information than during face-to-face collaboration. This project uses psychological experiments to examine how knowing where a partner is looking affects performance and strategies on collaborative tasks. Phase 1 asks: When partners are physically co-present, how aware are they of where the other is attending, and how do they achieve shared attention? Phase II applies these basic results to remote collaborations; partners wear eye-trackers that transmit gaze information to each other's computer displays. A space of tasks and representations is explored: Tasks are varied in systematic ways (e.g., some lend themselves to parallel activity, while others require consensus for each step), and different representations of the same gaze information are compared. The goal is to understand which representations work best for which tasks. With technological advances making eyetracking easier, less cumbersome, and more affordable, a gaze-based computer interface may someday join the ranks of ubiquitous input devices like the mouse. If this technology is to be integrated into the "every citizen interface," it is necessary to understand how people use the information in gaze to achieve a joint focus of attention. This could provide the foundations for new technology for computer-mediated collaboration.