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We're Beginning to Understand the Power of Eye Contact | Discover Magazine
Hirsch’s experiments have also revealed the unique tendency for two brains to synchronize during eye contact and verbal communication. “They become kind of phase-locked in a coherent state,” she says of this dyad brain activity.
Emerging research out of Dartmouth has similarly highlighted pupil synchrony in the eyes. Researchers Thalia Wheatley, an expert in social brain science, and Sophie Wohltjen published a study last fall exploring the nuances of eye contact and “shared attention” during conversations. Interestingly, they found that precise moments of shared eye contact actually decrease the pupil synchrony between two people, perhaps in a beneficial way.
They hypothesize that this function can spark unexpected variation that enlivens an interaction. “Eye contact may usefully disrupt synchrony momentarily in order to allow for a new thought or idea,” Wheatley said in a press release about the study.
New research debunks importance of eye contact -- ScienceDaily
The study involved a researcher engaging in four-minute conversations with 46 participants where both parties wore Tobii eye tracking glasses.
"For approximately half the conversations the researcher looked at the eyes most of the time, and for the other half gazed predominantly at the mouth," Dr Rogers said.
After the conversations, the participants rated how much they enjoyed the conversations.
"The mouth group perceived the same amount of eye contact and enjoyed the conversations just as much as the eye group," Dr Rogers said.
He said the results suggest that when specifically focused on trying to determine the gaze of one's partner, people demonstrate limited capacity to do it accurately.
"People are not very sensitive to the specific gaze focus of their partner to their face; instead they perceive direct gaze towards their face as eye contact," Dr Rogers said.
I see therefore I think
For example, in the seven or so seconds, on average, that it took students in the study to solve a logical reasoning problem, researchers recorded at least 23 eye movements. Among other clues, ocular activity indicated which data students absorbed, or disregarded, to arrive at their conclusions.
The study builds on previous findings by Bunge and fellow researchers that track cognitive changes in students during mentally challenging learning tasks. For example, a 2012 study found that a three-month LSAT course strengthened the circuitry in the brain's frontoparietal network and boosted the reasoning skills of two dozen young adults, compared to pre-law students who did not complete the course.
Eye movements take edge off traumatic memories: Human study investigates neurobiology of widely used yet controversial psychotherapy technique -- ScienceDaily
Investigating the neurobiological mechanisms underlying EMDR in healthy men and women, Lycia de Voogd and colleagues found that both side-to-side eye movement and a working memory task independently deactivated the amygdala -- a brain region critical for fear learning. The researchers show in a second experiment that this deactivation enhanced extinction learning -- a cognitive behavioral technique that reduces the association between a stimulus and a fear response. The reduced amygdala activity is thought to be a consequence of less available resources since they are dedicated to making eye movements.
Novice pilots improve visual responses to simulation by watching experts' eye movements: Eye movements reliably distinguish between novice and expert military pilots -- ScienceDaily
The researchers also explored whether the differences in eye movements between expert and novice pilots could be developed into a training regimen. One group of novices watched a video in which an expert pilot solved a complex emergency procedure in a military flight simulator. Another group watched the same video, but with a representation of the expert pilot's eye movements superimposed onto the video (a dot moved around the screen in real time, indicating eye position).
When retested, only the latter group had acquired expert eye movement techniques. This occurred without explicit instructions about what the dot was or how to use it. The results suggest that modeling expert eye movements may benefit pilot training.
Why the lights don't dim when we blink: Blinking prompts eye muscles to keep our vision in line -- ScienceDaily
"Our eye muscles are quite sluggish and imprecise, so the brain needs to constantly adapt its motor signals to make sure our eyes are pointing where they're supposed to," Maus said. "Our findings suggest that the brain gauges the difference in what we see before and after a blink, and commands the eye muscles to make the needed corrections."
From a big-picture perspective, if we didn't possess this powerful oculomotor mechanism, particularly when blinking, our surroundings would appear shadowy, erratic and jittery, researchers said.
"We perceive coherence and not transient blindness because the brain connects the dots for us," said study co-author David Whitney, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley.
"Our brains do a lot of prediction to compensate for how we move around in the world," said co-author Patrick Cavanagh, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College. "It's like a steadicam of the mind."
A dozen healthy young adults participated in what Maus jokingly called "the most boring experiment ever." Study participants sat in a dark room for long periods staring at a dot on a screen while infrared cameras tracked their eye movements and eye blinks in real time.
Every time they blinked, the dot was moved one centimeter to the right. While participants failed to notice the subtle shift, the brain's oculomotor system registered the movement and learned to reposition the line of vision squarely on the dot.
After 30 or so blink-synchronized dot movements, participants' eyes adjusted during each blink and shifted automatically to the spot where they predicted the dot to be.
"Even though participants did not consciously register that the dot had moved, their brains did, and adjusted with the corrective eye movement," Maus said. "These findings add to our understanding of how the brain constantly adapts to changes, commanding our muscles to correct for errors in our bodies' own hardware."
How physical exercise aids in stroke recovery: Engaging in voluntary physical exercise helps protects the brain it from the damaging effects of a stroke, shown in mice -- ScienceDaily
In order to do this, Kalogeraki and her co-authors used a standard test to assess the brain's 'plasticity' -- its ability to change the way it activates in response to an experience. When the visual input of one eye is compromised for a couple of days, then the part of the brain that processes visual information gets preferentially activated by the other, open eye. The brain's ability to change eye dominance (called ocular dominance plasticity) is age-related, being most pronounced in juvenile animals and completely absent in older mice that have been raised without any stimulation.
As well as confirming existing knowledge about the anti-aging effects of voluntary physical exercise -- older mice that exercised retained the ability to change eye dominance in comparison to those that didn't -- the study also revealed some exciting new findings. Those mice that had free-access to a running wheel were able to maintain ocular dominance plasticity after suffering a stroke, compared to those that didn't.
"We found that mice with free access to a running wheel throughout their life preserved a more juvenile brain into adulthood and were able to prevent the negative effects of a stroke," reveals Kalogeraki.
That was not all -- in addition, the researchers observed that exercise could even be used therapeutically after suffering a stroke. "We also found that mice with no previous access to a running wheel showed an equally positive recovery if voluntary exercise started after a stroke had occurred," adds Dr. Justyna Pielecka-Fortuna, co-author of the study.
Did you miss that musical beat? Your pupils didn’t | Science | AAAS
Even if you don’t have rhythm, your pupils do. In a new study, neuroscientists played drumming patterns from Western music, including beats typical in pop and rock, while asking volunteers to focus on computer screens for an unrelated fast-paced task that involved pressing the space bar as quickly as possible in response to a signal on the screen. Unbeknownst to the participants, the music omitted strong and weak beats at random times. (You can listen below for an example of a music clip they used. If you listen carefully, you can hear bass and hi-hat beats omitted throughout.) Eye scanners tracked the dilations of the subjects’ pupils as the music played. Their pupils enlarged when the rhythms dropped certain beats, even though the participants weren’t paying attention to the music. The biggest dilations matched the omissions of the beats in the most prominent locations in the music, usually the important first beat in a repeated set of notes. The results suggest that we may have an automatic sense of “hierarchical meter”—a pattern of strong and weak beats—that governs our expectations of music, the researchers write in the February 2017 issue of Brain and Cognition. Perhaps, the authors say, our eyes reveal clues into the importance that music and rhythm plays in our lives.
Sensing Loneliness: How Making Eye Contact Connects Us - Yahoo News
"There's something special about joint attention," says Elliot Berkman, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, of his takeaway from the Japanese study. "Joint attention is just looking at something together -- two people looking at the same thing at the same time." In addition to studying mutual gaze, or participants looking into each other's eyes, researchers looked at the effect of people's joint attention. The latter -- as with teachers and students being on the same page -- appeared to play a role in brains syncing. "Merely just looking into people's eyes didn't cause this ... synchronization of eye blink. It was really only after you had that joint attention first. So there I think it tells a very functionalist story." But compared with prior research findings, the researchers found that synchronization wasn't attributed to merely doing the same activity, either, but to mutual gaze.
Personality traits in eyes?
Look closely for ‘crypts’ in my eyes (lines going away from the iris, labelled 1 above) and this suggests I’m a warm, tender-minded person. If you see furrows (labelled 3 above), then, watch out, I’m impulsive.
Seeing someone see you
’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
Dog day evening
Once, when he was performing “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” the first play in David Rabe’s Vietnam trilogy, in Boston, in 1972, Pacino made a strong connection with a pair of penetrating eyes in the audience. “I remember feeling a focus I never experienced before—intense, so riveting that I directed my performance to that space,” he said. “I found at curtain call for the first time that I needed to find out who belonged to those eyes. So, as we were bowing, I looked over to the space where I believed the look was coming from and there it was, two seeing-eye dogs still looking at me. They must have found the curtain call as engaging as the performance.”
