Differences in head orientation behavior for speakers and listeners: An experiment in a virtual environment

An experiment was conducted to investigate whether human observers use knowledge of the differences in focus of attention in multiparty interaction to identify the speaker amongst the meeting participants. A virtual environment was used to have good stimulus control. Head orientations were displayed as the only cue for focus attention. The orientations were derived from a corpus of tracked head movements. We present some properties of the relation between head orientations and speaker–listener status, as found in the corpus. With respect to the experiment, it appears that people use knowledge of the patterns in focus of attention to distinguish the speaker from the listeners. However, the human speaker identification results were rather low. Head orientations (or focus of attention) alone do not provide a sufficient cue for reliable identification of the speaker in a multiparty setting.