title: Accuracy of head orientation perception in triadic situations: experiment in a virtual environment.
abstract: Research has revealed high accuracy in the perception of gaze in dyadic (sender- receiver) situations. Triadic situations differ from these in that an observer has to report where a sender is looking, not relative to himself. This is more difficult owing to the less favourable position of the observer. The effect of the position of the observer on the accuracy of the identification of the sender's looking direction is relatively unexplored. Here, we investigate this, focusing exclusively on head orientation. We used a virtual environment to ensure good stimulus control. We found a mean angular error close to 5 degrees. A higher observer viewpoint results in more accurate identification. Similarly, a viewpoint with a smaller angle to the sender's midsagittal plane leads to an improvement in identification performance. Also, we found an effect of underestimation of the error in horizontal direction, similar to findings for dyadic situations.
authors.affiliation: Human Media Interaction Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, PO Box 217, NL 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands. poppe@ewi.utwente.nl
authors.forename: Ronald
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Poppe
authors.forename: Rutger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rienks
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Heylen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005221:Fatigue; D005260:Female; D006257:Head; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014796:Visual Perception