Since we can say a lot about ourselves with our eyes during a conversation, scientists have asked the question – should we make direct eye contact with each other, or is it enough to communicate by looking at each other’s face?
Researchers in Canada have found that people rarely look directly at each other in conversation.
Face-to-face contact is even rarer, but he can predict that the participant in the conversation will then follow the gaze of the other person more often, as long as the conversation continues.
Mutual gaze is one of the most basic nonverbal communication behaviors, but it has not been well studied, the team explains, and the scientists add that this is partly because previously available mobile eye-tracking technology has limited measurement of eye movements during real-life interactions.
“This study is one of the first to show the frequency of eye-to-eye contact during real-life interactions,” says first study author Florence Mayrand, an experimental psychologist at McGill University in Canada.
“We found that, surprisingly, direct contact eye to eye was quite rare during interactions, but that it is significant for social dynamics. It seems that the time during which we are in contact is in eye to eyeeven for a few seconds, an important predictive factor for subsequent social behavior,” the study states.
Meyrendova and her colleagues observed eye gaze patterns during face-to-face conversations between 15 pairs of strangers, consisting of 25 women and five men. All participants in the experiment were between 18 and 24 years old.
Couples who had conversations were followed by a camera that recorded their field of vision. The researchers recorded how often the participants looked at each other’s mouths and eyes.
The researchers further recorded the gaze direction of each individual in response to their partner’s face. During the interaction, each participant looked away more than they looked directly at their partner’s face.
When they looked at each other’s faces, they mostly looked at the mouth and around the eyes, and rarely made direct eye-to-eye contact with each other. Looking into each other’s eyes was the most common.
Previous research shows that eye contact is important in communication, so this was a surprise, and the gaze behavior contrasts with other studies in groups of three or four.
“We found that participants spent only about 12 percent of their conversation time in interactive viewing, meaning they were looking at each other’s faces at the same time for only 12 percent of the duration of the interaction,” Meirendova says.
“More surprisingly, within those interactions, participants engaged in face-to-face contact only 3.5 percent of the time.
But when the couples looked directly into each other’s eyes, one of them was more likely to follow their partner’s gaze in the next test. The scientists also linked mutual eye-to-mouth gaze with subjects’ tendency to follow their partner’s gaze in another experiment.
The amount of time people spend looking into each other’s eyes may be important for conveying social messages between them, researchers say, and different patterns of mutual gaze may be useful for conveying certain messages in different situations.
The team of scientists believes that it would be interesting in the future to study how the context of the conversation affects how people look at each other’s faces.
The sample size was quite small, so larger studies may provide broader results. Another possibility is that gaze dynamics may be different when people are with friends instead of strangers.
“The context of social messages communicated through the eyes remains a very interesting research question for future work,” the authors conclude.
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Source: www.sitoireseto.com
