Development of gaze aversion as disengagement from visual information.

Abstract

Older children, but not younger children, were found to look away more from the face of an interlocutor when answering difficult as opposed to easy questions. Similar results were found in earlier work with adults, who often avert their gaze during cognitively difficult tasks (A.M. Glenberg, J.L. Schroeder, & D.A. Robertson, 1998). Twenty-five 8-year-olds and 26 5-year-olds answered verbal reasoning and arithmetic questions of varying difficulty. The older children increased gaze aversion from the face of the adult questioner in response to both difficult verbal reasoning questions and difficult arithmetic questions. In contrast, younger children (5-year-olds) responded less consistently to cognitive difficulty.It is concluded that adultlike patterns of gaze aversion in response to cognitive difficulty are certainly acquired by 8 years of age. The implications of appropriate gaze aversion for children's management of cognitive resources are considered.Development of Gaze Aversion 3 During difficult cognitive activity, for example remembering information, thinking of an answer to a question, planning what we are going to say, and speaking, we often close our eyes, look up at the sky, or look away from the person we are in conversation with. A number of studies, described below, report ways in which adults switch off from environmental stimulation (both live faces and other sorts of visual displays) in order to concentrate on cognitive tasks. In contrast, there has been little done on gaze aversion as a response to cognitive demands in children. This is a potentially important omission since the efficiency with which children process information influences many aspects of their development, including school progress. This article reports a study of gaze aversion in two age groups of children. In our introduction we first look at the evidence linking visual communication signals and cognitive effort.We then discuss why children might differ from adults in their strategies to deal with this cognitive effort. The final section of the introduction describes the motivations behind the current study. Visual Communication Signals and Cognitive EffortConsiderable research effort has been expended on examining the role played by visual communication signals in human interaction. There is much evidence that visual communication signals (such as eye gaze, gesture and facial expression) are often important sources of information. Indeed many researchers propose that such signals play a facilitatory role in human communication (for example, Clark & Brennan, 1991;Goldin-Meadow, Wein, & Chang, 1992;McNeill, 1985). However, the fact that such signals are informative means that they carry a cognitive load. The processing costs of visual signals are documented. A number of researchers have linked excessive eye gaze with increased cognitive load on interlocutors (Beattie, 1981;Ellyson, Dovidio, & Corson, 1981). In addition, the cognitive difficulty of a task seems to relate to the likelihood that people avert their gaze ...

LIE Detection by Inducing Cognitive Load

“…Glenberg, Schroeder, and Robertson (1998) asked participants moderately difficult general informational questions requiring memory searching and showed that averting gaze away from environmental distraction facilitated the allocation of cognitive resources to internal processing that enhanced performance. Doherty-Sneddon and Phelps (2005) and Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, and Doyle (2002) replicated these results with children. If lying is more cognitively demanding than truth telling, we propose that a corollary of Glenberg et al's position is that less eye movement should be evident during deception.…”

“…Stimulation from the environment can be distracting and impair internal processing (Doherty-Sneddon et al, 2002;Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps, 2005;Glenberg et al, 1998). Expanding on this notion, we predicted less eye movements for liars because their high cognitive loads focused on internal processing would have them reducing environmental distraction.…”

Brief Report: Patterns of Eye Movements in Face to Face Conversation are Associated with Autistic Traits: Evidence from a Student Sample

“…It has previously been demonstrated that individuals use gaze aversion when processing cognitively demanding information (Doherty-Sneddon et al, 2002;Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps, 2005;Glenberg et al, 1998). In a social interaction people show little gaze aversion when they are listening to another person speak, rather gaze aversion predominantly occurs when people are thinking about a response and when they are speaking (Doherty-Sneddon et al, 2002;Glenberg et al, 1998). The current experiment had two phases: when participants were speaking and when participants were listening.…”

Eye movements and their functions in everyday tasks

“…24 The function of fixations away from the face is quite different from those involved with picking up visual information (see Figure 2b). Deliberately averting gaze may facilitate thinking, 25 but it also sends a signal to the conversant that it is not yet their time to speak. Making regular eye movements to and away from the listener ensures that they are paying attention, as well as signalling that the speaker knows this (communication which may be more difficult via video or webcam 24 ).…”