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New research from Dartmouth College suggests that the rise and fall of shared attention during interpersonal conversations is marked by making (and breaking) eye contact. These findings (Wohltjen & Wheatley, 2021) will appear in the September 14 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This study shows that when two people are conversing, their pupils synchronize periodically. Pupillary synchrony appears to peak during moments of shared attention. But, it can be hard to think of something original to say when you're gazing deeply into someone's eyes. The fresh ideas and individual contributions that keep each person engaged during a conversation don't necessarily happen when two people's eyes are locked.
"Conversation is the platform where minds meet to create and exchange ideas, hone norms, and forge bonds," the authors explain.
For this study, they asked, "How do minds coordinate with each other to build a shared narrative from independent contributions?" Their findings suggest that "eye contact may be a key mechanism for enabling the coordination of shared and independent modes of thought, allowing conversation to both cohere and evolve."
"Eye contact is really immersive and powerful," lead author Sophie Wohltjen, a graduate student in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, said in a September 2021 news release.
When two people are having a conversation, eye contact signals that shared attention is high—that they are in peak synchrony with one another.
As eye contact persists, that synchrony then decreases. We think this is also good because too much synchrony can make a conversation stale. An engaging conversation requires, at times, being on the same page and, at times, saying something new. Eye contact seems to be one way we create a shared space while also allowing space for new ideas.
"In the past, it has been assumed that eye contact creates synchrony, but our findings suggest that it's not that simple," senior author Thalia Wheatley, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and principal investigator at their Social Systems Laboratory, said in the news release. "We make eye contact when we are already in sync, and, if anything, eye contact seems to then help break that synchrony. Eye contact may usefully disrupt synchrony momentarily in order to allow for a new thought or idea."
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