Eye Contact Is a Two-Way Street: Arousal Is Elicited by the Sending and Receiving of Eye Gaze Information
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Research shows that arousal is significantly enhanced while participants make eye contact with a live person compared to viewing a picture of direct or averted gaze. Recent research has pointed toward the potential for social interaction as a possible driving force behind the arousal enhancement. That is, eye gaze is not only a signal perceived but also a signal sent out in order to communicate with others. This study aimed to test this by having dyads engage in eye contact and averted gaze naturally, while wearing sunglasses, and while blindfolded; such that the gaze signals were clear, degraded, and blocked, respectively. Autonomic nervous system arousal was measured via skin conductance response and level. The results showed that dyads exhibited the highest degree of arousal (increased skin conductance) while making eye contact (send/receive) compared to send-only or receive-only gaze trials; however, this was only the case if eye contact was clear. Once gaze information became degraded (by sunglasses or blindfold), arousal significantly decreased and was no longer modulated by the sending and receiving of gaze. Therefore, the arousal enhancement observed during eye contact is not only caused by receiving gaze signals (the focus of previous research) and should be more accurately attributed to the subtle interplay between sending and receiving gaze signals.Keywords:
Eye contact
Skin conductance
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Abstract Most experimental protocols examining joint attention with the gaze cueing paradigm are “observational” and “offline”, thereby not involving social interaction. We examined whether within a naturalistic online interaction, real-time eye contact influences the gaze cueing effect (GCE). We embedded gaze cueing in an interactive protocol with the iCub humanoid robot. This has the advantage of ecological validity combined with excellent experimental control. Critically, before averting the gaze, iCub either established eye contact or not, a manipulation enabled by an algorithm detecting position of the human eyes. For non-predictive gaze cueing procedure (Experiment 1), only the eye contact condition elicited GCE, while for counter-predictive procedure (Experiment 2), only the condition with no eye contact induced GCE. These results reveal an interactive effect of strategic (gaze validity) and social (eye contact) top-down components on the reflexive orienting of attention induced by gaze cues. More generally, we propose that naturalistic protocols with an embodied presence of an agent can cast a new light on mechanisms of social cognition.
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Eye contact constitutes a strong social signal in humans and affects various attentional processes. However, eye contact with another human might evoke different responses compared with a direct gaze depicted on a screen. Previous embodied gaze-cueing experiments with iCub humanoid robot showed eye contact modulations on gaze-cueing effect using a long stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA: 1000 ms, no predictive gaze cue). Instead, eye contact did not modulate the gaze-cueing effect using a shorter SOA (500 ms, no predictive gaze cue). In the present study, we investigated whether a robot’s eye contact on the screen could modulate the gaze-cueing effect by adapting the previous embodied experiments to a screen-based setup. Specifically, in two experiments we examined the impact of eye contact on the gaze-cueing effect for non-predictive cues while we varied the SOA (500 ms and 1000 ms). Our results showed that the robot’s direct gaze did not modulate the gaze-cueing effect (gaze-cueing effect present in all conditions), thereby suggesting that direct gaze presented in a 2D format on the screen has less impact on observers than its 3D embodied version in a physically present robot. Overall, our findings stress the importance of embodied interactions for understanding the mechanisms of social cognition.
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This study examined effects of arousal level on the physiological responses in a polygraph examination using the Concealed Information Test (CIT). Thirty-nine healthy college students were tested with or without evaluative observation. Electrodermal activity, blood pressure, heart rate, normalized pulse volume, and respiration were recorded. Observation elevated participants' arousal level, which was manifested in self-reports, high skin conductance level, and low normalized pulse volume (i.e., vasoconstriction). However, differential reactivity to critical and non-critical items on the physiological measures was less affected by observation. These results suggested that participants' arousal level has little effect on differential physiological reactivity on the CIT.
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The present paper investigated visual interaction in conversational dyads by using a larger range of gaze pattern measures associated with conversation than the total eye contact measure. Specifically, it aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the localized gaze pattern measure, which was scored for each subject by summing up gaze patterns for 3s immediately prior to and following the end of the interviewer's utterance over three occasions. Twenty female students were interviewed by one male student for about 10min. The interview topics were “fashion” for the first 5min and “sex” for the remaining 50min. (1) The frequency of a subject's gaze and eye contact was significantly greater in the “fashion” topic than in the “sex” topic, but the total amount and average length of both measures were not significantly different between the topics. (2) Immediately after the end of the interviewer's utterance subjects' gaze decreased, with significantly lesser localized gaze in the “sex” topic than in the “fashion” topic. It could thus be said that the localized gaze measure was more sensitive than the total eye contact measure.
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