Why eye contact is important for interaction
Researchers at the National Institute of Physiological Science (NIPS) revealed that mutual eye contact sparks a region in the brains of two interacting parties. The finding indicates that this synchronized brain activity is crucial in establishing and facilitating face-to-face social interaction.
The NIPS team enrolled 96 volunteers who were not mutually acquainted, and conducted a series of tests to investigate the brain activity during situations with sustained eye contact.
Three sets of experiments were conducted over 2 days. Participants were paired with different partners and instructed to hold each other’s gaze in real time under various conditions. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imagining to monitor the brain activity that took place during mutual gaze. Takahiko Koike, the study’s first author, explains: “We expected that eye-blink synchronization would be a sign of shared attention when performing a task requiring joint attention, and the shared attention would be retained as a social memory.” They also expected that the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in the brain would be activated by both the initiator and the respondent to the gaze.
Indeed, the researchers detected synchronization of eye-blinks, together with enhanced inter-brain synchronization in the IFG, in the pairs when eye contact was established. Compared with findings from previous studies, these outcomes show that synchronization of eye-blinks is not attributable to a common activity, but rather to mutual gaze. This indicates that mutual eye contact might be a crucial component for human face-to-face social interactions, given its potential to bind two individuals into a singular connected system. This topic warrants further investigation to truly understand what is at work behind interpersonal communications.
“Based on the enhancement of behavioral and neural synchronization during mutual gaze, we now know that shared attention is hard to establish without eye contact,” Norihiro Sadato, senior author of the study, says. “Further investigation into the workings of eye contact may reveal the specific functional roles of neural synchronization between people.”
