Maria Staudte

Maria leads the project "Language-Mediated Gaze in Embodied Virtual Agents" which bridges the gap between a psycholinguistically motivated approach (PI Crocker), on the one hand, and the aim to design human-like virtual characters (JRG Kipp), on the other hand, in investigating the role of non-verbal cues (like gaze) in spoken face-to-face interaction.

Research interests

Maria's research interests have centered 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.
To investigate these issues, Maria exploits interaction scenarios involving both people and artificial agents (robots as well as virtual agents). Such agents have the benefit of being fully controllable confederates for which erroneous or odd behaviour is acceptable such that a broader range of manipulations and phenomena can be conducted and investigated.