Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We know that communicating with others can lead to mutual adaptations in the signals adopted. It is less clear whether and how interlocutors converge in their cognitive representations of communicative referents. By tracking eye movements during dialogue and probing interlocutors' representations of a set of referents before and after interaction, we captured the interactional dynamics underpinning mutual representational adaptations. In this exploratory study focused on attention, we investigated the relationship between dyads' gaze dynamics during a communication game, the Tangram task, and interaction-related changes in their representation of a set of referents, measured using explicit and implicit similarity probes. A cross-recurrence analysis of participants' gaze showed, in replication of Dale, Kirkham, and Richardson (2011), that interlocutors' gaze became increasingly synchronized as the task progressed. We further operationalized events of mutual understanding using gaze coherence and investigated the semantic and pupillary dynamics leading to these moments of mutual understanding.