The role of eye movements in non-verbal communication during educational interactions
Project description
Non-verbal communication is essential to the teaching and learning process. It enables teachers to aid students to comprehend new concepts and verify their understanding. Particularly, communicating using eye movements serves both as a tool for the teacher to convey messages and to decipher students’ attentiveness by their gaze. However, while it is easier to exploit gaze signals in interaction with a single student, it is a challenging task to use and interpret gaze signals within a multi-student classroom. This challenge stresses the need for assistive tools that detect and alert students' attentiveness. Our research aims to allow such tools, by discovering the social aspect of eye movements during social interactions in the educational setting. The current goal is to unravel the social role of gaze aversion. For this, we will measure the ability to detect the internal attentive state of other individuals, by observing their gaze aversions. In parallel, a computational classifier will be developed to be trained and perform the same task, allowing exploration of specific gaze patterns and promoting applicative developments. Next, we will measure the same ability in children of different ages, to provide a developmental perspective. Finally, we will examine the effect of gaze signals on the quality of learning during a live interaction between teacher and student.
About me
I hold a B.A. in psychology and cognitive sciences, and an M.A. in psychology, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During my M.A., I studied the impact of saliency on the temporal dynamics of attention, under the supervision of Prof. Ayelet Landau. In addition, I hold a certification in educational psychology, and have experience as an educational psychologist in schools, kindergartens, and in the clinic. My daily encounter with students, teachers and principals, inspires me to integrate their needs and insights with the science of learning.