The dual nature of eye contact: to see and to be seen

Abstract

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.

Mentalizing eye contact with a face on a video: Gaze direction does not influence autonomic arousal

“…Complying with the results from the measures of autonomic arousal, the subjective measures of social presence and affective arousal and valence did not differ between the mentalizing conditions. Compared with results from previous studies showing an increase in subjective measures when believing being seen vs. not being seen by another live person (Myllyneva & Hietanen, , ), this result adds up to the idea that the same mentalizing processes are not initiated in eye contact with a person appearing in a video as compared to eye contact with a live person. It seems that the autonomic and subjective responses to eye contact depend on appropriate mentalizing processes – those reflecting the automatic contextual knowledge about being seen by another person.…”

“…Thus, the study provided strong evidence that the essential factor underlying the increased responses to eye contact was the knowledge of being seen by another person. In another study, it was further investigated whether the mere belief of being seen by another person is sufficient to trigger the enhanced response even when the viewer does not see the other person at all, or whether these responses are intimately tied to seeing the other person during the eye contact (Myllyneva & Hietanen, ). Despite heightened self‐awareness – attesting of differences in higher‐order cognition – the belief of being seen by itself did not elicit corresponding physiological responses in the absence of any visual information about the other person.…”

Audience effects: what can they tell us about social neuroscience, theory of mind and autism?

“…Being observed leads to cardiovascular changes, with increases in stress response when being observed during an difficult task and decreases when being observed an easy task (Blascovich et al 1999). In fact, direct gaze from a real person leads to changes in skin conductance response compared to conditions without direct gaze (Myllyneva and Hietanen 2015a). Changes in arousal from direct gaze may also account for performance in a memory task (Helminen et al 2015).…”

Frontal temporal and parietal systems synchronize within and across brains during live eye-to-eye contact

“…Eye-to-eye contact in natural situations, however, also includes additional features such as dynamic and rapid perception of eye movements, interpretation of facial expressions, as well as appreciation of context and social conditions (Myllyneva & Hietanen, 2015; 2016; and Teufel et al, 2009). A hyperscanning (simultaneous imaging of two individuals) study using fMRI and two separate scanners has shown that responses to eye movement cues can be distinguished from object movement cues, and that partner-to-partner signal synchrony is increased during joint eye tasks (Saito et al, 2010), consistent with enhanced sensitivity to dynamic properties of eyes.…”

“…A hyperscanning (simultaneous imaging of two individuals) study using fMRI and two separate scanners has shown that responses to eye movement cues can be distinguished from object movement cues, and that partner-to-partner signal synchrony is increased during joint eye tasks (Saito et al, 2010), consistent with enhanced sensitivity to dynamic properties of eyes. Further insight into the social and emotional processing streams stimulated by eye contact originates from behavioral studies where cognitive appraisal of pictured eye-gaze directions has been shown to be modulated by social context (Teufel et al, 2009), and neural responses recorded by electroencephalography, EEG, were found to be amplified during perceptions of being seen by others (Myllyneva & Hietanen, 2016). Modulation of EEG signals has also been associated with viewing actual faces compared to pictured faces and found to be dependent upon both social attributions and the direction of the gaze (Myllyneva & Hietanen, 2015).…”