It is widely accepted that "the eyes are the mirror of the soul," a proverb so ingrained in common knowledge that we often take it for granted, seldom contemplating its profound implications. Fortunately, scholars like Isabella Poggi exist to illuminate the beauty and complexity of our behavior, particularly when it is camouflaged in plain sight, making it challenging to discern. Similar to the allegory of Plato's cave, Poggi guides us to comprehend how limited our understanding is regarding the use of our eyes, providing a thorough and scientific exploration of their role in our social lives. Upon completing this book, one inevitably perceives others' eyes through an entirely different lens.
Alessandro Vinciarelli. Full Professor at University of Glasgow - School of Computing Science
Poggi provides a profoundly original treatment which has the potential to revolutionize the fields it addresses. The book is bound to make the reader think and reconsider many assumptions they have been taking for granted, while at the same time it is written in clear language that will be accessible even to beginners.
Applying a variety of methodologies, Poggi produces a coherent proposal for the bold, maybe even daring, thesis that gaze can be described as a language, not in a metaphorical sense, but literally, that it is organized like language, hence with the equivalent of phonemes, morphemes, words, meanings, pragmatics, and so on, through much of gamut of linguistic constituents. This book has the potential to bring together several different fields (the study of gesture, gaze, and emotions, Ekman's FACS, ethology, some areas of robotics and of eye tracking) in an integrated field. The book is groundbreaking and a synthesis at the same time. Poggi's effort is a refreshing example of scholarship and theory building.
Dr. Salvatore Attardo, Professor at Texas A&M University
Isabella Poggi's The Language of Gaze offers powerful new insights into the role of gaze in human interaction. Attardo and Pickering's recent Eye-tracking in Linguistics focuses on eye movements when a person describes a visual scene and, more relevantly, gaze patterns between two people during a humorous conversation. There has been much study in the past of manual gesture as a complement to the use of spoken language (as distinct from the use of hands, face and other parts of the body in signed languages) as well as study of facial expressions of emotion, with cross-species accounts going back to Darwin. Recent work has seen facial expression (including the direction of gaze) studied not only in relation to emotion but also as a complement to language use in signaling syntactic information and managing turn taking. Poggi contributes to such studies but carries them further by not only highlighting the role of gaze in multimodal communication but also suggesting how "talking with the eyes" - and facial expression more generally -- can have an important impact on how humans interact in everyday life, politics, education, and more. In this way, Poggi builds upon and greatly extends her exploration -- in her book with Francesca D'Errico, Social In?uence, Power, and Multimodal Communication -- of how democratic leaders and dictators use words, voice, gesture, face, gaze, and posture to boast about their own merits or insult and ridicule rivals.
Michael Arbib, University of California, San Diego
