Intention Inference Mechanism Occurring In Joint Attention

The direction of a person's gaze indicates what object is of current focus. Observers can infer another's intent, even the subsequent action, based on his/her gaze direction. People are so sensitive to gaze direction that when they observe someone looking in a particular direction, their attention will be shifted to the same location in space voluntarily. This joint attention phenomenon has lead to numerous studies. Base on existed evidence, researchers generally agree that joint attention is reflexive, and it triggers observer's cognitive reactions automatically. However, gaze is not always goal-oriented; and chasing the gaze cue blindly will lead to invalid attention shift, thus reduce the cognitive efficiency. There are several benefits to explore whether attention shifts with other's gaze reflexively, namely whether different intention inferences affect the joint attention:first, it will help to show mechanisms of intention process; second, it will deepen the understanding of social cognition and interpersonal communication, third, it can provide scientific foundations and theoretical directions to artificial intelligence.This study is aimed to explore whether attention always shifts reflexively with observed gaze cue. We adopt the classical gaze cue paradigm, and use the gaze cue effect value to measure RT differences between processes of the object appeared at the gazed position and the object appeared at the opposite position. We also use extra clues to indicate intentions of the gazers in all the three experiments.Experiment 1 combined the head orientation and gaze cue, but failed to find any difference caused by different intentions of attention shift. Experiment 2 used gaze cue only, and the results showed that joint attention is not reflexive. Once the observer infers from the context that the eye movement is not caused by the shift of interesting points, then he/she will never chase the gaze cue again. Experiment 3 preserved the same physical characteristic of experiment 2, but prevented subjects from forming the corresponding intentions. The results showed that the effect can't be attributed to physical characteristic differences between different backgrounds. In sum, this study supports the following hypothesis:attention is not shifted with the observed gaze cue reflexively. We then conclude that intention inference is the intrinsic mechanism of joint attention.