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Published on: March 25, 2011
The effects of genuine eye contact on visuospatial and selective attention
Jari K Hietanen1, Aki Myllyneva1, Terhi M Helminen1
1Human Information Processing Laboratory, School of Social Sciences and Humanities/Psychology, University of Tampere.
Abstract:
We investigated performance in a visuospatial discrimination task and selective attention task (Stroop task) while a live person's direct or averted gaze was presented as a task-irrelevant contextual stimulus. Based on previous research, we expected that response times to peripherally presented targets (Experiment 1) and to the Stroop stimuli (Experiment 2) would be longer in the context of direct versus averted gaze. Contrary to our expectations, the direct gaze context resulted in faster discrimination of visual targets and faster performance in the Stroop task compared with the averted gaze context. We propose that the observed results are explained by enhanced arousal elicited by genuine eye contact. (PsycINFO Database Record
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