Visual Attention as a Marker of Leadership Emergence

Pavicic, Jake Dean

Visual Attention as a Marker of Leadership Emergence

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pavicic_jake_2025_thesis.pdf (1.23 MB)

Date

2025-08-18

Authors

Pavicic, Jake Dean

Abstract

This thesis establishes and applies a novel taxonomy of speech-contextualized visual attention behaviours to examine leadership emergence. Using eye-tracking glasses to record gaze during real-time social interactions, I derived behavioural metrics—including responsive and unprompted attention, attention shifts, and attention lag—to capture distinct functions of gaze toward speakers and non-speakers. Regression and relative weight analyses revealed that these metrics were distinct and uniquely associated with perceived leadership. Greater responsive attention and shifts away from a speaker predicted leadership emergence, whereas unprompted shifts toward a non-speaker showed promising but inconclusive effects. Individual characteristics such as conscientiousness—but not extraversion or cognitive ability—were related to gaze behaviours, suggesting attention may reflect perceived task engagement more than sociability. These findings contribute new methodological and conceptual tools for studying leadership as it unfolds in interactions. The taxonomy offers a path forward for disentangling attention and influence in both research and applied settings

Summary for Lay Audience

How people allocate visual attention during group interactions can offer insight into how groups comprised of unfamiliar individuals see each other. Specifically, those who are seen as leaderlike by their group members were expected to gain more attention than those who were not seen as leaders. Attention was identified in a variety of ways, including the time a person was looked at, the amount of times they were looked at, and the time it took for them to gain or lose attention. These metrics of attention were also distinguished by speech, such that I looked at the amount of time a person was looked at while speaking and while not speaking, the number of times they lost attention while speaking and gained it while silent, the delay between a person starting speech and gaining attention, and ending speech and losing it. This study used eye-tracking glasses to measure gaze behaviour throughout an interaction among groups of university students. These students rated the extent to which they believed their groupmates were leaderlike and these scores were examined in relation to the metrics of attention. Results revealed that individuals rated as leaders attracted more gaze while speaking, but also lost attention more frequently and more quickly after speaking ceased. The metrics of gaze behaviour were moderately to strongly interrelated, and personality traits—especially conscientiousness—predicted several attention metrics. Together, these findings suggest that some aspects of visual attention reflect beliefs about leadership emergence, but there is inconsistency. Future work is needed to further flesh out the relationships.