Gaze and blinking in dyadic conversation: A study in coordinated behaviour among individuals

Face to face conversation necessarily involves a great deal of bodily movement beyond that required for speaking. We seek to understand the systematic variation of such para-linguistic activity as a function of the ebb and flow of conversation. Gaze and blinking in dyadic conversation are examined, along with their relation to speech turn. Eight pairs provide 15 minutes of conversation each, including five participants who partake in two dyads each. This facilitates a thorough examination of the rich covariation of gaze and blinking both within an individual and as a function of the dyad. Many aspects of systematic variation are found to be relatively invariant within the individual, but individuals display large qualitative differences, one from the other. Keywords: BlinkingGazeCoordinative structureConversation Acknowledgments Authors would like to thank Catharine Oertel, Donnacha Costello, Tiernan Williams, and Rob Brennan for their willingness to learn complex annotation techniques and provide annotations for methodological verification. They would also like thank three very diligent and thorough anonymous reviewers. Partial results from two dyads only were presented at the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, in Galway, Ireland, 2010.