Check out this interesting research in joint attention and avatars. It examines the role of leading someones gaze with your own in stimulating the reward and motivation centres of your brain. It also shows that when you follow someone elses gaze, it stimulates those parts of your brain responsible for imagining another persons thoughts.

As a consultant I have rarely advocated the use of avatars to my clients, preferring other ways of providing mentoring/advisory scaffolding. But this could be useful in developing avatars that not only form part of the learning, but also reinforce the learning. For example, an avatar could tell a story and move its eyes to lead the learner to a visual element or key points that appear on-screen to reinforce or build upon the story. In so doing it may stimulate the learner to hear what the avatar is saying and then speculate on what the additional on-screen elements mean to the story and for them personally. In effect you could use it to activate the learners imagination.

Here’s an example. An avatar is telling a story about an accident in which a worker loses an arm in a chainsaw accident. As the story unfolds, the avatar gazes to the left and an image appears of a person looking at their watch, holding a chainsaw, with a chain guard in pieces at their feet and contemplating a stack of logs. This may stimulate the learner to reflect on what caused the logger to lose an arm. Were they under time pressure and so decided not to put the chain guard on the chainsaw?

Alternatively, the avatar could be made to simulate ‘following’ the learnrs gaze, thus stimulating the learners reward and motivation sensors. Of course without retinal tracking this would be difficult, but you may be able to fake it. Imagine a game on-screen where the avatar explains the rules of the game and then begins. In the game the learner must be the first to identify the correct object out of several on screen by clicking on it.

The avatar could gaze at the various options, making comments about their thoughts on each possible answer, revealing their interior dialogue to the learner and possibly mirroring the learners thoughts (also relevant to mirror neurons and social learning). You could delay the discovery of the right answer by the avatar, so that when the learner clicks the object, the avatar’s gaze moves to the correct object and it declares that it has found the object, but the learner found it first. This tactic may engender feelings of leadership and accomplishment in the learner.

This example is a bit trite, but you get the idea. Anyway interesting stuff. Of course it’s not just limited to eLearning. Even more powerful is the conscious use of eye contact in leading and following by classroom trainers and mentors. Many opportunities abound here.

How might you use joint attention in your learning activities?