Face-to-face contact in a conversation is rarer than you think
Key takeaways
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Canadian researchers found that eye contact rarely occurs when two people are talking.
A Dual Mobile Eye Tracking Study on Natural Eye Contact During Live Interactions
Summary
Human eyes transmit a large amount of social information, and mutual gazes represent one of the characteristic gaze communication behaviors. However, it remains relatively unknown whether such reciprocal communication requires eye contact or whether general face- to-face gaze is sufficient. To address this question, while recording gaze behavior in live-interacting dyads using dual mobile eye trackers, we analyzed how often participants looked at each other as a function of looking toward the upper half (i.e., the eye region). ) and the lower half of the face (i.e. the mouth region). Furthermore, we examined how these different types of mutual gaze during an interaction, connected to subsequent gaze-following behavior, elicited in a single experimental task.
The results indicated that the dyads looked at each other in various gaze combinations ( eye-to-eye, eye-to-mouth, and mouth-to-mouth ), but spent proportionally little time in direct gaze contact. However, time spent in eye contact significantly predicted the magnitude of subsequent gaze following the response elicited by the partner’s gaze direction. Therefore, humans adopt gaze patterns toward different parts of the face during interactions, and direct eye-to-eye gazes occur relatively infrequently; However, social messages conveyed during eye contact appear to contain key information that propagates and affects subsequent individual social behavior.
Comments
"We found that participants spent only about 12% of conversation time in interactive gazes, meaning they looked at each other’s faces simultaneously for only 12% of the duration of the interaction," said lead researcher Florence Mayrand, a student PhD from McGill University’s department of psychology in Montreal.
"Even more surprising, within those interactions, participants maintained mutual eye contact only 3.5% of the time," Mayrand added in a university news release.
But when someone looks you in the eye, take note: The gesture communicates nonverbal information that is vital for a future interaction, the researchers noted.
For the study, the research team paired participants and presented them with an imaginary survival scenario. In this scenario, they had to sort a list of items in order of usefulness for survival, all while wearing mobile eye-tracking goggles.
The researchers analyzed how often the participants looked at each other’s eyes and mouth, as well as whether they followed the other person’s gaze. During interactions, participants spent more time looking away than looking at their partners’ faces, the researchers found.
When they looked at each other’s faces, they looked equally frequently at each other’s mouths and eyes, and spent little time in eye contact. But when couples looked directly into each other’s eyes, one of them was more likely to follow his partner’s gaze afterwards.
"We found that, surprisingly, direct eye-to-eye contact was quite rare during interactions, but that it is important for social dynamics," Mayrand said. "The moment we make eye contact, even for a few seconds, appears to be an important predictor of subsequent social behavior."
The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports .
Follow-up research could focus on what messages are conveyed through gaze and whether what is said influences a person’s gaze patterns during interactions.
