class="head no_bottom_margin" id="sec1title">IntroductionIt is commonly believed that leadership is reflected in gaze behavior. Stereotypical thinking links leadership to prolonged gazing toward leaders () and longer mutual gazing in response to interactions initiated by leaders (). However, evidence for an actual relationship between leadership and social gaze behaviors is limited. To date, investigations on the influence of leadership on gaze behavior have focused on computer-based paradigms that do not provide any opportunity for social interaction (, , ). The aim of the present study was to develop a novel approach to investigate how leadership shapes gaze dynamics during real-world human group interactions.Authentic social situations are complex and highly dynamic (). What is more, unlike computer-based paradigms, they involve the potential for social interaction and reciprocity. When looking at a representation of a social stimulus (e.g., images of people), individuals need not worry about what their own gaze might be communicating to the stimulus. When looking at real people, in contrast, the eyes not only collect information (encoding function) but also communicate information to others (signaling function; ). This dual function of gaze yields an interdependency among multi-agent gaze patterns, which traditional computer-based paradigms, be they static or dynamic scene-viewing tasks, arguably fail to capture ().Despite a growing understanding of the necessity of studying social cognitive processes in interactive () and complex settings (), little is known about the influence of leadership on gaze-based interactions in unconstrained group interactions. Older studies report that, in dyadic interactions, attribution of power increases as the proportion of looking while speaking increases (, , ). However, the evidence is inconclusive as to whether gazing decoupled from speaking time identifies leaders (). Moreover, it remains unclear whether the same dynamics constraining dyads also constrain group interactions.A major reason for the lack of studies investigating group gaze-based interactions is the difficulty of simultaneously tracking transient variations in multi-party gaze features to capture the implicit semantics of social gaze behaviors. In the attempt to overcome these limitations, in this study, we developed a novel tripartite approach combining (1) computer vision methods for remote gaze-tracking, (2) a detailed taxonomy to encode the implicit semantics of multi-party gaze features, and (3) advance machine learning methods to establish dependencies between leadership and visual behaviors during unconstrained group interactions involving four people simultaneously. The basic idea for establishing a relationship between social gaze behavior and leadership was to conceptualize multi-party gaze features as patterns and to treat the analysis as a pattern classification problem: can a classifier applied to the visual behavior pattern of real people interacting in small groups reveal the leader? This is the first question we addressed in the study described here. The second question is whether the relationship between gaze behavior and leadership generalizes across leadership styles and situational conditions—in other words, whether gaze behavior can serve as a general marker of leadership.Drawing on ideas from social psychology (, href="#bib19" rid="bib19" class=" bibr popnode">Foels et al., 2000, href="#bib36" rid="bib36" class=" bibr popnode">Livi et al., 2008, href="#bib38" rid="bib38" class=" bibr popnode">Northouse, 2016), we analyzed gaze-based interaction dynamics in four leadership settings resulting from the orthogonal manipulation of leadership style (i.e., Democratic versus Autocratic) and situational condition (i.e., Low time-pressure versus High time-pressure). Democratic leadership is expected to be more effective under situational conditions of low time-pressure, whereas autocratic leaderships are expected to be more effective under situational conditions of high time-pressure (href="#bib17" rid="bib17" class=" bibr popnode">Fiedler, 2006, href="#bib40" rid="bib40" class=" bibr popnode">Pierro et al., 2003). The orthogonal manipulation of leadership styles and situational conditions resulted in two high-fit conditions (Democratic-Low time-pressure, Autocratic-High time-pressure) and two low-fit conditions (Democratic-High time-pressure, Autocratic-Low time-pressure) (href="/pmc/articles/PMC6562365/figure/fig1/" target="figure" class="fig-table-link figpopup" rid-figpopup="fig1" rid-ob="ob-fig1" co-legend-rid="lgnd_fig1">Figure 1A; see also href="#mmc1" rid="mmc1" class=" supplementary-material">Supplemental Information and href="#mmc1" rid="mmc1" class=" supplementary-material">Figure S1 for group composition and manipulation checks). Each group, composed of one designated leader and three followers, was assigned a survival task to solve within a limited time (see href="/pmc/articles/PMC6562365/figure/fig1/" target="figure" class="fig-table-link figpopup" rid-figpopup="fig1" rid-ob="ob-fig1" co-legend-rid="lgnd_fig1">Figure 1B for the experimental setting). First, using a method for automatically estimating the Visual Focus of Attention (VFOA; href="#bib1" rid="bib1" class=" bibr popnode">Ba and Odobez, 2006, href="#bib5" rid="bib5" class=" bibr popnode">Beyan et al., 2016, href="#bib22" rid="bib22" class=" bibr popnode">Gatica-Perez, 2009, href="#bib44" rid="bib44" class=" bibr popnode">Stiefelhagen et al., 1999), we determined “who looked at whom.” Then, we established a detailed taxonomy of multi-party gaze behaviors and, combining the VFOA of individual group-members, reconstructed the gaze-based interaction dynamics. Next, we probed the actual association between leadership and gaze patterns by asking whether a pattern classification algorithm could discriminate leaders and followers among the group-members. After finding evidence for leadership classification, we finally tested whether the classifier was able to generalize across leadership styles, situational conditions, and time.href="/pmc/articles/PMC6562365/figure/fig1/" target="figure" rid-figpopup="fig1" rid-ob="ob-fig1">class="inline_block ts_canvas" href="/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=6562365_gr1.jpg" target="tileshopwindow">target="object" href="/pmc/articles/PMC6562365/figure/fig1/?report=objectonly">Open in a separate windowclass="figpopup" href="/pmc/articles/PMC6562365/figure/fig1/" target="figure" rid-figpopup="fig1" rid-ob="ob-fig1">Figure 1Study Design and Experimental Setting(A) Study design and manipulation of leadership style and situational condition.(B) Schematic reproduction of the experimental setting (drawing not to scale). Participants seated on four equidistant chairs (1), while four individual video-cameras were recording the upper part of their bodies (2).
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