Studying “natural” eye movements in an “unnatural” social environment: The influence of social activity, framing, and sub-clinical traits on gaze aversion

Abstract

Experimental psychologists frequently present participants with social stimuli (videos or pictures) and measure behavioural responses. Such designs are problematic in that they remove the potential for social interaction and inadvertently restrict our eyes multifaceted nature as a tool to both perceive and communicate with others. The aim of this study was to develop a new paradigm within which we can easily and reliably measure the influence of top-down processes (belief), social activity (talking and listening), and possible clinical traits (gaze anxiety, and social interaction difficulties) onto gaze behaviours. Participants were engaged in a “real” or pre-recorded Skype conversation. Findings suggest that participants who believed they were engaging in a real conversation spent less time looking at the speaker’s eyes, but no differences were found for dwell time onto the whole face. Within our non-clinical sample, higher levels of gaze anxiety resulted in reduced dwell time onto the whole face but not eyes, whereas social interaction difficulties produced reduced dwell time onto the eyes only. Finally, talking consistently produced reduced dwell time onto the whole face and eyes regardless of any other conditions.

Being watched: Effects of an audience on eye gaze and prosocial behaviour

“…In line with this, the analysis with the group of excluded participants suggests that this pattern of results is specific to the group of participants who believe the manipulation (see S7). However, this finding contrasts with a recent study by Mansour and Kuhn (2019) , where they find that participants in a communicative situation direct more gaze to the eyes of the confederate in a live video-call than in a pre-recorded video-call. A critical difference is that in their paradigm the confederate was talking about herself for around 2.5 min in a rather relaxed context, whereas in our tasks the confederate asked a short question of around 10 s (Story task) or 3 s (Offer task) in a more rigid context.…”

“…For instance, it has recently been shown that it is the potential for social interaction, rather than online social presence, which modulates eye gaze in video-conference contexts ( Gregory & Antolin, 2018 ). Mansour and Kuhn (2019) have also shown that when participants are required to actively engage with the confederate, they direct more gaze to the eyes of the confederate in the live video-call than in the pre-recorded video-call. Thus, communicative (e.g.…”

“…To do this, we designed a deceptive video-conference interface that participants would use to complete the study. This novel experimental paradigm allows for well-matched control and test conditions but at the same time preserves enough ecological validity (see Mansour & Kuhn, 2019 for a recent paper using a similar paradigm), which ensures that changes in behaviour are true audience effects. The main desktop of the interface showed three different boxes: the Video box, where the video-feed was presented, the Question box, where the questions appeared, and the Answer box, where the options for the answer were shown (see Fig.…”

Effects of being watched on eye gaze and facial displays of typical and autistic individuals during conversation

“…However, it is not yet clear how gaze patterns change from pre-recorded to live communicative contexts, where participants are required to actively engage with the confederate (e.g. conversation) (see Cañigueral & Hamilton, 2019a; Mansour & Kuhn, 2019 for two recent studies on this question). An important feature of communicative exchanges is that gaze patterns are coordinated with other social signals, such as speech.…”

Evaluation of an eye tracking setup for studying visual attention in face-to-face conversations

“…In this paradigm, two people communicate with each other via video streaming, while their gaze behavior is tracked on the computer display showing the interaction partner. In recent studies, this approach has been proven feasible for investigating social attention during video-based communication 26 – 28 . Although these approaches improve the ecological validity of eye tracking research in social situations, video-based social interactions seem to be affected by the method used for communication 29 and the possibility of establishing eye contact is only made possible by complex technical setups 30 .…”