
Maria Staudte
Maria Staudte has been head of the Independent Research Group Embodied Spoken Interaction within the Cluster of Excellence since August 2012.
Short CV
Before Maria started the independent research group at the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction, she was a postdoc within the Cluster at the Saarland University and a visiting researcher at SUNY Stony Brook University from 2012-2013.
Her group aims to investigate the interplay of language and non-verbal cues in spoken face-to-face interaction by following an integrated approach that unites psycholinguistic methods and research questions with the aim to design human-like agents and dialog systems. One key question is, for instance, how non-linguistic cues, such as referential gaze and gestures, mediate (visual) attention and influence the on-line mapping between language and the visual environment. To investigate these issues, her group exploits interaction scenarios involving both people and artificial agents or language generation systems. Such systems have the benefit of being fully controllable confederates for which erroneous or odd behavior can be acceptable, such that a broader range of manipulations and phenomena can be conducted and investigated. Simultaneously, the results from ongoing projects directly contribute to the improvement of systems used for human-computer interaction, for instance in making instructions in virtual and real environments more efficient, or in making virtual agents more human-like and the interaction with them more natural.
Research interests
Maria's research interests center around situated and multimodal communication, i.e., how individuals interact in a shared environment by means of various information channels such as language, gaze and gesture. Specifically, she seeks to find out which information gaze and referential gestures may convey and how this affects speech production and comprehension. One important question is, for instance, how such non-linguistic cues mediate (visual) attention and influence the on-line mapping between language and the visual environment.
Contact

Publications
- Torsten Kai Jachmann and Heiner Drenhaus and Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker The Influence of Speaker's Gaze on Sentence Comprehension: An ERP Investigation In: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2017, London, UK, 16-29 July 2017, 2017
- Laura Frädrich and Fabrizio Nunnari and Maria Staudte and Alexis Héloir Simulating Listener Gaze and Evaluating Its Effect on Human Speakers In: Intelligent Virtual Agents - 17th International Conference, IVA 2017, Stockholm, Sweden, August 27-30, 2017, Proceedings, 2017
- Mirjana Sekicki and Maria Staudte The Facilitatory Effect of Referent Gaze on Cognitive Load in Language Processing In: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2017, London, UK, 16-29 July 2017, 2017
- Konstantina Garoufi and Maria Staudte and Alexander Koller and Matthew W. Crocker Exploiting Listener Gaze to Improve Situated Communication in Dynamic Virtual Environments In: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2017, London, UK, 16-29 July 2017, 2016
- Nikolina Koleva and Sabrina Hoppe and Mohammad Mehdi Moniri and Maria Staudte and Andreas Bulling On the interplay between spontaneous spoken instructions and human visual behaviour in an indoor guidance task In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2015, Pasadena, California, USA, July 22-25, 2015, 2015
- Nikolina Koleva and Martin Villalba and Maria Staudte and Alexander Koller The Impact of Listener Gaze on Predicting Reference Resolution In: Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, ACL 2015, July 26-31, 2015, Beijing, China, Volume 2: Short Papers, 2015
- Chiara Gambi and Torsten Kai Jachmann and Maria Staudte Listen, Look, Go! The Role of Prosody and Gaze in Turn-End Anticipation In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2015, Pasadena, California, USA, July 22-25, 2015, 2015
- Maria Staudte, Matthew W. Crocker, Alexis Heloir, Michael Kipp The influence of speaker gaze on listener comprehension: Contrasting visual versus intentional accounts In: Cognition, 2014
- Maria Staudte and Ulrich Pfeiffer When eye see you: Gaze and joint attention in human interaction In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2013, Berlin, Germany, July 31 - August 3, 2013, 2013
- Maria Staudte and Alexander Koller and Konstantina Garoufi and Matthew W. Crocker Using listener gaze to augment speech generation in a virtual 3D environment In: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2012
- Alexander Koller and Konstantina Garoufi and Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker Enhancing Referential Success by Tracking Hearer Gaze In: SIGDIAL Conference, 2012
- Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker and Alexis Heloir and Michael Kipp Speaker gaze affects utterance comprehension beyond visual attention shifting In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2011
- Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker Investigating Joint Attention Mechanisms through Spoken Human-Robot Interaction In: Cognition, 2011
- Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker and Alexis H{\'{e}}loir and Michael Kipp Speaker gaze affects utterance comprehension beyond visual attention shifts In: Proceedings of the 33th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2011, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, July 20-23, 2011, 2011
- Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker When Robot Gaze Helps Human Listeners: Attentional versus Intentional Account In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2010
- Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker Visual Attention in Spoken Human-Robot Interaction In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'09), 2009
- Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker The effect of robot gaze on processing robot utterances In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2009
- Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker The utility of gaze in human-robot interaction In: Proceedings of "Metrics for HRI", Workshop at the 3rd ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'08), 2008