Social interactions entail reciprocal reactions where one’s communicative acts triggers responses in others. Fluent interpersonal exchange relies on the ability to discriminate behaviors produced by others that are responses to one’s actions, thus involving a social sense of agency. Given the pivotal role of gaze in human communication, we propose to use gaze following as a model for studying the sense of agency in social actions. The experiment investigates the influence of sensory expertise and timing of the action’s effects by comparing feedback provided by a human avatar versus a nonfigurative animated object (an arrow) and by varying the control exerted by participants’ gaze on the feedback (avatar vs arrow). Results revealed a linear relationship between the judgement of agency and feedback latencies and higher agency discriminating performances with the avatar. These outcomes suggest that classical cognitive accounts of the sense of agency can be expanded to the realm of social actions and provide important information for designing virtual agents to train social gaze interactions.

中文翻译：

---

凝视领导中的社会代理感

社交互动需要相互反应，其中一个人的交往行为会触发他人的反应。流利的人际交流依赖于辨别他人对自己的行为做出反应的行为的能力，因此涉及社会的代理意识。考虑到凝视在人类交流中的关键作用，我们建议使用凝视跟随作为研究社会行为中的代理感的模型。该实验通过比较人类化身与非图形化动画对象（箭头）提供的反馈，以及通过改变参与者凝视对反馈的控制（化身与箭头），研究感官专长的影响以及动作效果的时间安排。结果显示代理的判断与反馈等待时间之间的线性关系，以及虚拟角色对代理的较高区分性​​能。这些结果表明，关于代理意识的经典认知解释可以扩展到社交行为领域，并为设计虚拟代理以训练社交注视互动提供重要信息。