Eye'll Help You Out! How the Gaze Cue Reduces the Cognitive Load Required for Reference Processing.

We report evidence from three visual-world eye-tracking experiments, showing that referential gaze leads to a shift in visual attention toward the cued object, which consequently lowers the effort required for processing the linguistic reference. Importantly, perceiving and following the gaze cue did not prove costly in terms of cognitive effort, unless the cued object did not fit the verb selectional preferences.
PMID: 30294808 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Cognitive Science - October 7, 2018 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Sekicki M, Staudte M Tags: Cogn Sci Source Type: research