ABSTRACT

Group interactions influence human social and cognitive function. However, the non-verbal vehicles of that influence remain poorly understood. To address this question, here we present a taxonomy of interactive non-verbal attentional gaze behaviours – social referencing, participation, and mutual engagement – which we captured and characterized during live three-person interactions. Experiment 1 measured how each of these non-verbal indices predicted both the groups’ social dynamic (in terms of leadership perception) and later individual group member’s behaviour (in terms of gaze following magnitudes). The data indicated that the three attentional gaze behaviours (i) reliably reflected the groups’ nonverbal dynamics, (ii) predicted the groups’ social dynamics, and (iii) connected meaningfully with individual members’ behaviour. Experiment 2 confirmed that these group-to-individual links were dependent on individuals participating in a prior group interaction. Thus, our taxonomy of nonverbal attentional gaze behaviours characterizes both group and individual function well, and as such provides a methodological foundation for future investigations of non-verbal group dynamics and their links with individual behaviour.

摘要

群体互动影响人类社会和认知功能。然而，这种影响的非语言载体仍然知之甚少。为了解决这个问题，我们在此提出了交互式非语言注意注视行为的分类法——社会参照、参与和相互参与——我们在实时三人互动中捕获和表征了这些行为。实验 1 测量了这些非语言指标中的每一个如何预测群体的社会动态（在领导力感知方面）和后来个别群体成员的行为（在凝视跟随幅度方面）。数据表明，三种注意力注视行为 (i) 可靠地反映了群体的非语言动态，(ii) 预测了群体的社会动态，以及 (iii) 与个体成员的行为有意义地相关联。实验 2 证实，这些群体与个人的联系取决于参与先前群体互动的个人。因此，我们的非语言注意凝视行为分类很好地表征了群体和个人的功能，因此为未来研究非语言群体动态及其与个人行为的联系提供了方法论基础。