Human eye contact found to be very quick and pupil dilation an indicator of preferred mutual gaze duration
Human eye contact found to be very quick and pupil dilation an indicator of preferred mutual gaze duration
July 6, 2016 by Bob Yirk
redit: George Hodan/public domain
(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers with University College London has found that the average amount of time people gaze into each other's eyes, in non-romantic settings, is remarkably short. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, the group describes experiments they carried out with volunteers and eye gazing and what they learned as a result.
Most animals use gazing as a form of communication, many use looking into the eyes of another as a way to signal a threat, or of interest. In humans, eye gazing has clearly been seen as a means of communication, the researchers note, though very little research has been conducted on the behavior, other than to use it as a form of diagnosis of mental impairments such as schizophrenia or autism. In this new effort, they sought to learn more about what they call preferred gaze duration (PGD)—the amount of time people feel is appropriate for a gaze. Shorter or longer gazes, they note, tend to cause people to feel uncomfortable or confused.
To learn more, they got 498 visitors to the London Science Museum to submit to a simple and relatively short test—to sit at a device with their chin on a rest (to prevent head movement), looking into a video screen. On the screen, actors were shown looking back at them. In the videos, the actors gazed back into the eyes of the volunteers for different lengths of time, and the volunteers were asked to push a red button when they felt the gaze had become uncomfortable. As the volunteers watched the actor on screen, their faces were recorded and their eye movements were tracked, as was the degree of pupil dilation.
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