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Previous research has shown that physiological arousal and attentional responses to eye contact are modulated by one's knowledge of whether they are seen by another person. Recently it was shown that this 'eye contact effect' can be elicited without seeing another person's eyes at all. We aimed to investigate whether the eye contact effect is actually triggered by the mere knowledge of being seen by another individual, i.e. even in a condition when the perceiver does not see the other person at all. We measured experienced self-awareness and both autonomic and brain activity responses while participants were facing another person (a model) sitting behind a window. We manipulated the visibility of the model and the participants' belief of whether or not the model could see them. When participants did not see the model but believed they were seen by the model, physiological responses were attenuated in comparison to when both parties saw each other. However, self-assessed public self-awareness was not attenuated in this condition. Thus, two requirements must be met for physiological responses to occur in response to eye contact: an experience of being seen by another individual and an experience of seeing the other individual.

We investigated performance in a visuospatial discrimination task and selective attention task (Stroop task) while a live person's direct or averted gaze was presented as a task-irrelevant contextual stimulus. Based on previous research, we expected that response times to peripherally presented targets (Experiment 1) and to the Stroop stimuli (Experiment 2) would be longer in the context of direct versus averted gaze. Contrary to our expectations, the direct gaze context resulted in faster discrimination of visual targets and faster performance in the Stroop task compared with the averted gaze context. We propose that the observed results are explained by enhanced arousal elicited by genuine eye contact. (PsycINFO Database Record

No abstract

Recent research has revealed enhanced autonomic and subjective responses to eye contact only when perceiving another live person. However, these enhanced responses to eye contact are abolished if the viewer believes that the other person is not able to look back at the viewer. We purported to investigate whether this "genuine" eye contact effect can be reproduced with pre-recorded videos of stimulus persons. Autonomic responses, gaze behavior, and subjective self-assessments were measured while participants viewed pre-recorded video persons with direct or averted gaze, imagined that the video person was real, and mentalized that the person could see them or not. Pre-recorded videos did not evoke similar physiological or subjective eye contact effect as previously observed with live persons, not even when the participants were mentalizing being seen by the person. Gaze tracking results showed, however, increased attention allocation to faces with direct gaze compared to averted gaze directions. The results suggest that elicitation of the physiological arousal in response to genuine eye contact seems to require spontaneous experience of seeing and of being seen by another individual.