Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation (2021)

fermatslibrary.com

41 pointsgodelmachine28 comments

Wonder how this differs for those who on the autistic spectrum who find eye contact painful in general?

Autism literally means "inward-turned" or "self-focused", so not a lot of mental space for shared attention there in the first place.

That is the opposite of my experience on the spectrum. I am hyper aware of people's body language and vocal patterns. My peripheral vision is just as effective if not more effective at "listening" to people because with full eye contact there is an extreme sense of intimate attention that subdues a lot of my other sensory inputs. Every other autistic person I know, have known, and the one I have married experiences this the same way, and would also disagree about them not having a lot of mental space for shared attention. Attention is just expressed differently.

Yeah, exactly. The sensory inputs that are subdued are the "self-bubble". Extreme attention paid to people from an emotional distance is heightened because it's processed through fear, like a prey animal.

The "extreme sense of intimate attention" is shared attention, where the we overtakes the me. It feels overwhelming because you don't want to give up the self-bubble - don't have the mental space for shared attention. Plus the autistic logic is self-reinforcing. Acting as though other people are predators, and their attention is dangerous, feeds on itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

The universe is shaped exactly like the earth

If you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were

I think I understand where you are coming from, but I don't think those generalizations about autistic people are accurate. I think there are some autistic people for which these might apply, but most of us are just hyperaware of our surroundings — including other people's body language and intonation patterns. Eliding eye contact in a conversation is less about a feeling of predator/prey and more about the multiple swimlanes of input we're concurrently processing. Think more along the lines of day-dreamers and space-cases rather than wallflowers avoiding social contact.

Shared attention is not something I nor other autistic people I know struggle with. Misplaced attention — toward our slow responses, toward our lack of eye contact, toward the way we choose to engage with others — is absolutely something we deal with on a day-to-day basis, primarily because people tend to have these rigid assumptions of how life is experienced through our senses.

(Re horseshoe theory: I think more people should consider horseshoe theory when considering left vs right rhetoric, but I'm not sure how it applies here)

One reason why online meetings suck so much! I can't look at the camera and people at the same time, there's no real way to make eye contact.

A company I was interviewing had a document they shared with applicants with interviewing guidance. One tip was to look directly into the camera when speaking so the interviewer feels you are present and attentive. Imagine two people looking at a camera instead of each other in an absurd attempt to make video chat more natural.

I just can't stop glancing back to myself. I always wonder about people who look at the same spot without glancing away frequently - do they have the self control that I lack, or do they just have their camera right near their own face and are looking at themselves the whole time?

If you turn off your self view it’s a lot easier to stay focused, I have found. Overall quality of calls is much higher for me.

Totally agree though a lot of video conference software mysteriously doesn’t allow you to disable this.

I resorted to getting an external web cam with a small tripod so I can position the camera in the middle of my monitor.

I take it you're not a fan of the wonderful AI-based eye contact correction solutions on the market?

I would say this paper (which to be fair, I only skimmed) shows why that doesn't work–you don't actually want constant eye contact!

So you're saying there's a market for AI-based intermittent eye contact correction solutions?

Well, it would have to know the correct time to initiate and break eye contact, which seems hard.

so you want keyboard controlled eye contact correction?

No, because I don't consciously think about when to make eye contact, so a keyboard I have to consciously press wouldn't work.

I think we'd need some kind of eye-tracking system which can detect when I'm trying to make eye contact, and then actually make eye contact for me.

And both people need it, so when you're trying to make eye contact, the other party's system will automatically make eye-contact with you (slightly delayed so it doesn't look they've been staring at you the entire time) and vice versa. Who looks away first though?

If the meeting attendees are laid out in a grid presumably it could tell when you’re looking at a specific person. Ideally it’d only send the corrected stream to the person being looked at.

Without a discussion of different cultural aspects, and how eye contact is not as common in many other cultures, I’m not sure how generalizable this study is. I would also like to see a sociocultural breakdown of the participants, and was there proportionate selection

> Without a discussion of different cultural aspects, and how eye contact is not as common in many other cultures

I'm tired of hearing this generic statement. Eye contact is used differently in different cultures, but it is important in all of them.

If you have a specific point you want to make please make it.

In eastern Asian cultures, eye contact is not made from a subordinate to someone up the hierarchy as a way to respect. In Islamic cultures, men and women should not make eye contact out of modesty and respect. “American” (really “white” culture) culture is very shouty, self-promotion driven, which is not universally shared and could be viewed as disrespectful to make eye contact by other cultures.

Cultural contextualization is often omited in this kind or research, and I think he is right to underline it. I agree : we can find a lot of science work taking for universal some local or date behaviour. And why would this kind of thinking would be banned of hn? It's clearly a legitimate epistemological question.

It's not. I'm just tired of undifferentiated, “but what about” comments.

It's so generic and overused that I have started tuning it out. What about eye contact in other culture is different?, which cultures?, what drove those differences?

There are literally thousands of human cultures. The job of assessing the cultural differences rests on the study authors, or just specify in the title that the study is American or Western centered.

First, note that all participants were from a single college in the US

> Participants. In this study, 186 subjects comprising 93 dyads (mean age: 19.38 y; 120 females) participated. Subjects were recruited from Dartmouth College and were compensated either monetarily or with extra course credit for participation. The study was approved by the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects Institutional Review Board at Dartmouth College, and in- formed consent was obtained prior to the start of the study. After the study had concluded, subjects indicated consent to the release of the videos obtained during their conversations for use in scientific presentations or publications. All subjects had normal or corrected-to-normal vision

Unfortunately the study makes a very broad conclusion, without mentioning its American focus or otherwise weighting cultural factors, not in the title, not in the conclusion, nor anywhere in the paper. No matter how tired you might be about this point, the study authors had a job and they didn't do it or even acknowledged this issue.

Sadly many people don't understand just how different cultures can be, I think this is part of the goal of having so many classes in undergrad that don't count towards the major. That's the whole idea of trying to make someone "well rounded". If you take classes in the humanities you get a glimpse of the variation. Some of those classes even discuss how many cultures aren't considered when doing studies like this

The participants were 186 people at Dartmouth who were paid. I'd wager >50% freshmen studying psychology. That's how a great deal of this sort of science works - when I was a freshman psych major at Stanford we got extra credit in some entry level classes for participating.

Participating in studies was a required part of my psych 104 course two decades ago.

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