This year, many of us have worked from our home offices, with usage of platforms such as Zoom and Skype rocketing as people communicate with colleagues, friends and family remotely.  New research from Florida Atlantic University explores how our communication changes when we use these platforms.

The research reveals that our gaze is often altered during video conferencing, precisely because we believe the other person can see us, and we’re highly sensitive to the gaze direction of other people.  Indeed, even children as young as 2 prefer it when people look directly at them.  It’s a phenomenon known as gaze cueing, and it provides a powerful signal to help us orient attention.

This is a natural consequence of human history, with conversations always being conducted face-to-face.  This assumption has been broken since the invention of the telephone, but video conferencing promises to make virtual communication more personal again.

Conversational norms

The researchers monitored volunteers, one group of whom believed they were engaged in a real-time interaction, and the second of whom thought they were simply watching a pre-recorded video.  The aim was to understand if face fixation increased in the real-time conversation because people expected the other speaker to be facing them in order to gain attention.

They also wanted to understand where exactly on the face people would fixate in both conditions.  Would the real-time condition encourage more attention to be paid to the eyes, for instance.

The data suggests that during the real-time conversations, the gaze would be fixed on the whole face of the other person, but during the pre-recorded condition, the mouth was the predominant area of the face people would focus on.  It also revealed no real difference in the time spent fixed on the eyes in both conditions.

“Because gaze direction conveys so much socially relevant information, one’s own gaze behavior is likely to be affected by whether one’s eyes are visible to a speaker,” the researchers explain. “For example, people may intend to signal that they are paying more attention to a speaker by fixating their face or eyes during a conversation. Conversely, extended eye contact also can be perceived as aggressive and therefore noticing one’s eyes could lead to reduced direct fixation of another’s face or eyes. Indeed, people engage in avoidant eye movements by periodically breaking and reforming eye contact during conversations.”

Real-time changes

Interestingly, in the real-time conditions, it was more common for participants to display avoidant fixation behaviors.  The lack of time spent on the eyes of the other person suggests that the extra time spent looking at the mouth during the pre-recorded conversation wasn’t done at the expense of eye contact, but rather reduced time spent looking elsewhere.

“Regardless of the specific mechanisms underlying the observed differences in fixation patterns, results from our study suggest participants were taking social and attentional considerations into account in the real-time condition,” the researchers conclude. “Given that encoding and memory have been found to be optimized by fixating the mouth, which was reduced overall in the real-time condition, this suggests that people do not fully optimize for speech encoding in a live interaction.”