The Role-Sensitive Nature of Gaze: Listener Engagement in Natural Group Interaction

Engagement, which refers to the degree to which individuals contribute and remain involved in ongoing communication (Poggi, 2007), is associated with effective coordination in social interaction. While speakers actively shape the information flow, listeners ultimately determine whether information is attended to, processed, and integrated into subsequent collaborative activity (Arnold, 2016; Özyürek et al., 2007). This makes understanding and enhancing listener engagement a crucial entry point for improving coordination in interaction. Gaze plays a fundamental role in coordinating attention and signaling social orientation between interaction partners, and mutual gaze has been associated with joint attention and increased engagement (Kleinke, 1986; Oertel et al., 2021; Wohltjen & Wheatley, 2021). However, the social meaning and effectiveness of gaze are not uniform and depend on interaction roles such as speaker and leader status (Gerpott et al., 2018; Capozzi et al., 2019; Cheng et al., 2023). In natural group interactions, where conversational roles shift continuously, and leadership often emerges implicitly, it remains unclear how gaze interacts with these roles to recruit listener engagement. The present study conducts a secondary data analysis of the MPII Group Interaction Dataset (Müller et al., 2021; Müller, Huang, & Bulling, 2018; Müller, Huang, Zhang, et al., 2018). We examine how listener engagement varies as a function of mutual gaze and how this relationship is structured by conversational roles (speaker vs. listener) and perceived leadership. By linking fine-grained gaze behavior to engagement dynamics in real-world interaction, this study aims to advance the understanding of engagement in natural group settings.