There is more to eye contact than meets the eye

Learning under your gaze: the mediating role of affective arousal between perceived direct gaze and memory performance

“…The authors suggested that this might be related to awareness of being seen by another person. The critical influence of the awareness of being seen by another person was more recently confirmed in another study where the participants were always faced by another person, but the participants either knew that the other person was also able to see them or they were deceived to believe that the other Psychological Research person could not see them (Myllyneva & Hietanen, 2015). The latter condition was realized by leading the participant to believe that a half-silvered mirror was positioned between the stimulus person and the participant.…”

“…Whether this ''half-silvered mirror'' was used or not, it created two different conditions: a belief of being seen (BS)--condition where the participant believed that she/he was seen by the storyteller, and a belief of not being seen (BnS)--condition where the participant believed that she/he was not seen by the storyteller, even though she/he saw the storyteller. A similar procedure was carried out as in a study by Myllyneva and Hietanen (2015) to realize the deceit.…”

“…However, our recent studies (Hietanen, Leppänen, Peltola, Linna-aho, & Ruuhiala, 2008;Myllyneva & Hietanen, 2015;Pönkänen, Peltola, & Hietanen, 2011) have indicated that the effect of eye contact on arousal is not solely a result of bottom-up visual processing of self-directed eyes, but arousal responses are strongly modulated by top-down cognitive processes. According to the studies by Hietanen et al (2008) and Pönkänen et al (2011), the arousing effect of direct gaze was evident in a situation where the other person was met face-to-face, but not when seeing a picture of the person's face on a computer monitor.…”

“…In the present study, we decided to investigate not only the effect of self-directed eyes on performance, but also the effect of knowledge of being seen by those eyes. To this end, we used a similar half-silvered mirror deception procedure that was used in Myllyneva and Hietanen (2015) study.…”

Modeling a Social Brain for Interactive Agents: Integrating Mirroring and Mentalizing

“…For example, it has been shown that intentionality-attribution and underlying mentalizing influence sensory processing to become "social perception", an altered understanding of each other's actions [19,14], which is also known as an "intentional stance" [4]. Clearly, these processes play an important role not only in solitary observation events, in which they have been studied mostly so far, but even more so in continuous online interaction [8,13].…”