Give Ear to My Face: Modelling Multimodal Attention to Social Interactions

We address the deployment of perceptual attention to social interactions as displayed in conversational clips, when relying on multimodal information (audio and video). A probabilistic modelling framework is proposed that goes beyond the classic saliency paradigm while integrating multiple information cues. Attentional allocation is determined not just by stimulus-driven selection but, importantly, by social value as modulating the selection history of relevant multimodal items. Thus, the construction of attentional priority is the result of a sampling procedure conditioned on the potential value dynamics of socially relevant objects emerging moment to moment within the scene. Preliminary experiments on a publicly available dataset are presented.