ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Enhancing social functioning using multi-user, immersive virtual reality.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Patterns of Gaze Behavior During Live Interactions in Adults and Adolescents with Autism or High Autistic Traits: A Systematic Review.Autism in adulthood · 2026Article
- Spoken disagreement is more constructive than written disagreement.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Towards an informational account of interpersonal coordination.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Neural activity flows through cortical subnetworks during speech production.Cell reports · 2026Article
- Interpersonal coordination in communication: effects of alignment in multiple modalities on objective and subjective task outcomes.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- Learning with others: teacher-learner brain synchrony depends on mutual gaze and joint attention.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Autistic eye contact? A hermeneutic phenomenological multicenter study of the similarities and differences in eye-contact experiences between adults with and without autism.Journal of neurodevelopmental disorders · 2025Article
- Eye Tracking in Aging: Challenges, Best Practices, and Novel Frontiers.ACM transactions on applied perception · 2025Article
- Interdependent minds: Quantifying the dynamics of successful social interaction.Current directions in psychological science · 2025Article
- Altered interactive dynamics of gaze behavior during face-to-face interaction in autistic individuals: a dual eye-tracking study.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Synchrony Across Brains.Annual review of psychology · 2025Review
- Environmental effects on inter-brain coupling: a systematic review.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Synchronous Smiles and Hearts: Dyadic Meditations Enhance Closeness and Prosocial Behavior in Virtual and In-Person Settings.Mindfulness · 2025Article
- Gaze-action coupling, gaze-gesture coupling, and exogenous attraction of gaze in dyadic interactions.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Nearsighted empathy: exploring the effect of empathy on distance perception, with eye movements as modulators.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Pupil contagion variation with gaze, arousal, and autistic traits.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Influence of autistic traits and communication role on eye contact behavior during face-to-face interaction.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Eyes meet, hands greet: The art of timing in social interactions.Perception · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Conversation is the platform where minds meet: the venue where information is shared, ideas cocreated, cultural norms shaped, and social bonds forged. Its frequency and ease belie its complexity. Every conversation weaves a unique shared narrative from the contributions of independent minds, requiring partners to flexibly move into and out of alignment as needed for conversation to both cohere and evolve. How two minds achieve this coordination is poorly understood. Here we test whether eye contact, a common feature of conversation, predicts this coordination by measuring dyadic pupillary synchrony (a corollary of shared attention) during natural conversation. We find that eye contact is positively correlated with synchrony as well as ratings of engagement by conversation partners. However, rather than elicit synchrony, eye contact commences as synchrony peaks and predicts its immediate and subsequent decline until eye contact breaks. This relationship suggests that eye contact signals when shared attention is high. Furthermore, we speculate that eye contact may play a corrective role in disrupting shared attention (reducing synchrony) as needed to facilitate independent contributions to conversation.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.