Roy S. Hessels
Papers
6
Total Citations
233
H-Index
6
About
Roy S. Hessels is a cognitive scientist whose research sits at the intersection of eye-tracking, social cognition, and human communication. His work focuses primarily on understanding how gaze behavior supports face-to-face interaction, with particular attention to the mechanisms by which people visually engage with one another during conversation and collaborative tasks. Hessels is perhaps best known for his landmark review, "How does gaze to faces support face-to-face interaction?" (2020), which has garnered 173 citations and stands as a foundational theoretical contribution to the field — notable for being among the first to offer a comprehensive framework explaining social gaze during live interaction. Building on this, his research has expanded into dyadic collaboration, exploring how visual routines extend beyond individual actors to coordinated multi-party behavior, and into cross-cultural gaze dynamics, challenging prevailing assumptions about gaze avoidance in East Asian versus Western cultures. His more recent work investigates the coupling between gaze, action, and gesture in live interactions, pushing toward richer, more integrative models of social vision. Hessels also examines how people perceive invitations to interact in everyday social scenes. Across these contributions, his research advances our understanding of the fundamental visual machinery underlying human social life.
Research Focus
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Top Papers
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- 6Perception of the Potential for Interaction in Social Scenes7 citations · 2021