Making eye contact has long been conceived as acting like a cohesive glue, connecting an individual to the person with whom they are talking. Its absence can signal social dysfunction. Similarly, the growing study of neural synchrony has focused on the positive aspects of alignment in brain activity between individuals.
In [a] new study, by using pupil dilation as a measure of synchrony during unstructured conversation, psychologist Thalia Wheatley and graduate student Sophie Wohltjen found that the moment of making eye contact marks a peak in shared attention—and not the beginning of a sustained period of locked gazes.
Synchrony, in fact, drops sharply after looking into the eyes of your interlocutor and only begins to recover when you and that person look away from each other. “Eye contact is not eliciting synchrony; it’s disrupting it,” says Wheatley.
Why would this be? Conversation requires some level of synchrony, but Wheatley and lead study author Wohltjen speculate that breaking eye contact ultimately propels the conversation forward.
“Perhaps what this is doing is allowing us to break synchrony and move back into our own heads so that we can bring forth new and individual contributions to keep the conversation going,” Wohltjen says.
