Socially Communicative Eye Contact and Gender Affect Memory

Abstract

Because of their value as a socially communicative cue, researchers have strived to understand how the gaze of other people influences a variety of cognitive processes. Recent work in social attention suggests that the use of images of people in laboratory studies, as a substitute for real people, may not effectively test socially communicative aspects of eye gaze. As attention affects many other cognitive processes, it is likely that social attention between real individuals could also affect other cognitive processes, such as memory. However, from previous work alone, it is unclear whether, and if so how, socially communicative eye gaze affects memory. The present studies test the assumption that socially communicative aspects of eye gaze may impact memory by manipulating the eye gaze of a live speaker in the context of a traditional recognition paradigm used frequently in the laboratory. A female (Experiment 1) or male (Experiment 2) investigator read words aloud and varied whether eye contact was, or was not, made with a participant. With both female and male investigators, eye contact improved word recognition only for female participants and hindered word recognition in male participants. When a female investigator prolonged their eye contact (Experiment 3) to provide a longer opportunity to both observe and process the investigator’s eye gaze, the results replicated the findings from Experiments 1 and 2. The findings from Experiments 1–3 suggest that females interpret and use the investigator’s eye gaze differently than males. When key aspects from the previous experiments were replicated in a noncommunicative situation (i.e., when a video of a speaker is used instead of a live speaker; Experiment 4), the memory effects observed previously in response to eye gaze were eliminated. Together, these studies suggest that it is the socially communicative aspects of eye gaze from a real person that influence memory. The findings reveal the importance of using social cues that are communicative in nature (e.g., real people) when studying the relationship between social attention and memory.

Effect of the model eye gaze direction on consumer information processing: a consideration of gender differences

“…Nevertheless, such effects might be weakened or not exist when people are not interested in such information. Our empirical findings seem congruent with those reported by Lanthier et al (2019), who indicated that men and women respond to a direct gaze differently, i.e. eye contact improves word recognition only among women.…”

“…Second, prior studies typically concentrate on the isolated impact of a direct gaze (Falck-Ytter et al , 2015; Lopis and Conty, 2019); few studies investigated the moderating effect of the viewer's gender (Lanthier et al , 2019). Studies (e.g.…”

“…Regarding the effects of the eye gaze direction, research in psychology and education has explored the potential facilitative effect of a direct gaze on information processing (Falck-Ytter et al , 2015; Lanthier et al , 2019). However, this research is rarely applied to the context of business, and it is important to extend theory testing to different contexts to validate related theories.…”

“…Some researchers (e.g. Goodman et al , 2012; Lanthier et al , 2019) suggest that the impact of the eye gaze direction may vary by gender. However, whether the design of a model's eye gaze direction could have different effects on consumers while considering gender has scantly been studied.…”

When eyes beat lips: speaker gaze affects audiovisual integration in the McGurk illusion

“…Similarly, if a speaker's direct gaze draws the addressee's attention to the speaker's eyes, as shown by previous research (e.g., Böckler et al, 2014, who Alternatively, however, one could predict that a speaker's direct, ostensive gaze leads to a general increase in the addressee's attention because she feels personally addressed and is eager to understand the speaker's message (cf. Csibra & Gergely, 2009;Lanthier et al, 2019Lanthier et al, , 2021. When the speaker speaks with closed eyes, the addressee might not consider herself the intended recipient of the message and thus not pay as much attention.…”