Welcome to the project “Deixis and Joint Attention: Vision in Interaction” (DeJA-VI)!
The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and runs from 01.09.2018 to 31.08.2023.
The project DeJA-VI investigates the use of gaze, verbal deixis and concurrent gestures to accomplish joint attention in naturally occurring social interaction. Our starting point is the assumption that deixis in its primordial use in face-to-face interaction involves embodied practices such as pointing, showing, demonstrating etc. and mutual perception, thus giving rise to recurring gaze patterns of the participants. The project addresses the neglected role of gaze practices in deictic reference and attention sharing. Its aim is to bridge the eye gaze gap in research on deixis.
The systematic investigation of gaze requires the accurate documentation of the participants’ eye gaze behavior. In striving both for ecologically valid and high-precision eye gaze data, data collection is accomplished with video cameras and mobile eye-tracking glasses worn by the participants in various social activities (e.g. cooking, visiting a museum, having a coffee, playing music, etc.). Methodologically situated within the framework of multimodal conversation and interaction analysis where video recording is used, it thus breaks new ground by employing a technology almost exclusively applied in experimental frameworks to record naturally occurring social interaction “in the wild”.
Meet our team and discover our project results.
