Eye Contact Vital To Successful Social Interaction

In most cultures, we are taught from the time we are young that making eye contact during conversation is not only a great way to keep someone's attention, but is considered polite. When a person is in love, they tend to gaze longingly at the object of their desire. Eye contact is extremely prevalent in society, and it is important in grabbing a person's attention.

Researchers have extensively studied the mechanisms of mutual gaze, or eye contact between two, and joint attention paid toward a third subject. These previous studies have shown that eye contact is a fundamental piece of face-to-face interaction, but the foundations of shared attention being maintained were still unclear and undefined.

A team of researchers at the National Institute of Physiological Science (NIPS) in Japan took a deeper look at how eye contact affects human interaction, and they found that mutual eye contact between two people synchronizes spontaneous activity in specific areas of the brains of those people. The study shows that face-to-face social interaction is, in part, established and facilitated by synchronized brain activity.

In the study, the NIPS team took 96 voluntary participants that were not previously acquainted and conducted several tests to examine brain activity of the volunteers during scenarios that involved consistent and sustained eye contact, according to a press release. The researchers used three sets of experiments to examine brain activity in real time, taking place over the course of two days. 

In the first test, volunteers were paired up and told to hold one another's gaze for periods of time under varying conditions and scenarios. Functional MRI was used to monitor the brains of the participants during mutual gaze.

"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," Takahiko Koike, an author of the study, said. Koike also stated that the team expected an activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), a part of the frontal lobe that deals with language processing and inhibition control, in both the initiator and respondent of the gaze.

The NIPS team found that when eye contact was established and maintained, both parties displayed synchronized eye-blinks, as well as inter-brain synchronization within the IFG. When compared with previous studies, the researchers saw that eye-blinks were attributable to mutual gaze, rather than common activity, showing that mutual eye contact can be considered a crucial component in face-to-face social interactions.

Mutual eye contact has the potential to bind the two participants into a singular, connected system, prompting the team to declare that further investigation would be required to really understand the depth of interpersonal communications. The study's senior author, Norihiro Sadato, echoed that sentiment.

"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," he said. "Further investigation into the workings of eye contact may reveal the specific functional roles of neural synchronization between people."

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