Hey,You Looking at Me

2019-02-27
The renowen(有名，著名) Spanish magician and magic theorist Juan Tamariz wrote in his classic book "The Five Points in Magic " that ,to make an audience feel seen , a performer must extend "imaginary threads from [the performer's ] eyes to the spectators " taking care to not break them during the performance . If a thread to one or more spectators should nevertheless(仍然) break, the performer must "turn directly toward him or them and talk to the person or persons " until the threads are reconnected .

A new study ,published earlier this month in the journal Perception, suggests that for spectators to feel that they have eye-to-eye contact onstage , the latter needs not extend imaginary threads from his or her eyes to the audience . In fact ,we perceive direct eye contact from other people not only when they look us in the eye, but also when they look at any other part of our face .

Shane Rogers ,Oliver Guidetti, and their collaborators at Edith Cowan University in Perth ,Australia,set out to determine whether interlocutors experience an 'eye contact illusion' during natural conversation,and if so ,how strong the misperception might be .To find out ,they conducted two eye-tracking studies.

In the first experiment,Guidetti in one on one 'getting acquainted ' conversations with 46 students ,with both Guidetti and the student wearing eye-tracking glasses .In one half of the 4-minute conversations, Guidetti looked at the student's eyes most of the time, and in the other half of the conversations, he looked at the students mouth most of the time .