Perception of being observed by a speaker alters gaze behavior

Previous research has shown that gaze behavior of a speaker's face during speech encoding is influenced by an array of factors relating to the quality of the speech signal and the encoding task. In these studies, participants were aware they were viewing pre-recorded stimuli of a speaker that is not representative of natural social interactions in which an interlocutor can observe one's gaze direction, potentially affecting fixation behavior due to communicative and social considerations. To assess the potential role of these factors during speech encoding, we compared fixation behavior during a speech-encoding task under two conditions: in the "real-time" condition, we used deception to convince participants that they were interacting with a live person who was able to see and hear them through online remote video communication. In the "pre-recorded" condition, participants were correctly informed they were watching a previously recorded video. We found that participants fixated the interlocutor's face significantly less in the real-time condition than the pre-recorded condition. When participants did look at the face, they fixated the mouth at a higher proportion of the time in the pre-recorded condition versus the real-time condition. These findings suggest that people engage in avoidance of potentially useful speech-directed fixations when they believe their fixations are being observed and demonstrate that social factors play a significant role in fixation behavior during speech encoding.