A study from Florida Atlantic University researchers takes a closer look at how virtual communication is affecting people’s gaze and attention during online meetings. The coronavirus pandemic has forced thousands of people to work from home. For many, this is the first time they are conducting business virtually.

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Now more than ever it is necessary to understand how technology may impact communication. Gaze direction conveys socially relevant information and can be dependent on whether a person can see the speaker. With video communication, sometimes speakers are visible and sometimes they are not. It is important to understand how a person’s attention is diverted in both virtual communication scenarios.

People are sensitive to the gaze direction of the person they are talking to. Gaze cueing is a powerful signal for orienting attention during a conversation. It plays a role in the joint attention phenomenon when several people are paying attention to the same thing at the same time. This phenomenon is one of the things that makes humans unique among primates.

For the study, the team compared fixation behavior in 173 participants. The participants were put in one of two conditions. In the first condition, participants were told they were engaging in real-time interaction, even though the video they were watching was prerecorded. In the second condition, participants knew they were watching a pre-recorded video.

The team wanted to know if face fixation would increase in a real-time condition based on the social expectation of facing the speaker to get attention or face avoidance would increase because of social norms and cognitive demands during a conversation. They also wanted to know where the participants naturally fixate on the face during conversation. Will participants focus on the eyes more in the real-time situation because of social demands to make eye contact with the speaker? In the pre-recorded condition, where social demands for eye contact are gone, will participants focus more on the mouth?

Results showed that participants fixated on the whole face in real-time conditions. Participants focused on the face significantly less in the pre-recorded condition. Participants in the pre-recorded condition fixated on the mouth more than the real-time participants. They found no significant differences in the time spent fixating on the eyes in either condition. Participants were more comfortable looking directly at the mouth when they think no one is watching them. The participant’s gaze was affected by the visibility of the speaker’s eyes.

Participants in the real-time scenario tended to display greater avoidant fixation behavior. This supports the theory that social contexts draw fixations away from the face. In the pre-recorded condition, the fixated attention was directed toward the mouth for a greater percentage of time than in the real-world conditions. Encoding and memory are optimized by fixation on the mouth, which was reduced in the real-time conditions. This suggests that people don’t fully optimize speech encoding during a live conversation.

The team says that gender, age, cultural background and native language didn’t have an influence on fixation behavior across both conditions. The results suggest that participants were taking social and attentional considerations into account in real-time conditions.

This study was published in Attention, Perception and Psychophysics.