Here's why eye contact during conversations is important, as per a new study

We all have heard of how important eye contact is during communication, and how it can help you engage better with the person you’re communicating with. But eye contact is more than just that, it can be used as a powerful social behavioural cue.

As per a recent by researchers in Canada, eye contact is quite rare but even that little gaze can act as a predictive factor for subsequent social behaviour.

"This study is one of the first to show the prevalence of eye-to-eye looking during real-life interactions," says first author Florence Mayrand, an experimental psychologist at McGill University in Canada.

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How was the study conducted?

The study was conducted in two parts. In the first part, Mayrand and her colleagues looked at eye-gazing patterns during face-to-face conversations between 15 pairs of strangers, made up of 25 women and 5 men, all between the ages of 18 and 24.

The pairs ranked 12 items in order of usefulness in a made-up survival situation while wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses with a front-facing camera recording their field of view.The researchers recorded how often the participants looked at each other's mouths and eyes.

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In the second part, researchers measured each individual's gaze in reaction to an image of their partner's face looking in different directions. Then the final analysis was brought down to 12 females and 2 males in 7 pairs.

What does the study show?

The interactions between people during the study deduced that each participant looked away more than they looked directly at their partner’s face. While looking at each other’s faces, they mostly looked at the mouth and nearby eye regions, and they rarely engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact. The most common was eye-to-mouth mutual-looking.

"We discovered that participants spent only about 12 per cent of conversation time in interactive looking, meaning that they gazed at each other's faces simultaneously for just 12 per cent of the interaction duration," Mayrand says.

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"Even more surprisingly, within those interactions, participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5 per cent of the time."

Why is eye contact important?

As per the research, the amount of time people spend looking each other in the eyes may be important for communicating social messages between them and different mutual looking patterns may be useful for relaying specific messages in different combinations.

The team says that they will further look into how conversational context affects people looking at each other’s faces with a larger sample size.

(With inputs from agencies)