Cultural differences in mutual gaze during face-to-face interactions: A dual head-mounted eye-tracking study

Figures & data

Figure 1. Participant’s point-of-view during the dyadic interaction, with gaze overlaid.

Figure 2. Bounding box surrounding the face region, with features identified for region-of-interest tracking.

Figure 3. Proportional face looking time (range 0 to 1) of East Asian and Western Caucasian participants during the introduction and storytelling task, both when listening and when speaking (see also Table 1 for values). Gaze times are proportional to approx. 30-second recording time per condition (task/speech).

Table 1. Medians and interquartile ranges for face orienting (in %).

		East Asians Mdn (IQR)	Western Caucasians Mdn (IQR)
Introduction	Speaking	68.85 (33.69)	52.35 (36.24)
	Listening	95.19 (6.64)	96.74 (5.47)
Storytelling	Speaking	50.59 (38.57)	32.60 (31.14)
	Listening	93.69 (12.94)	87.84 (18.97)

Figure 4. Proportional mutual gaze time (range 0 to 1) for East Asian and Western Caucasian participants during the introduction and the storytelling task (see also Table 2). Gaze times are proportional to approx. 1-minute recording time per task.

Table 2. Means and standard deviations for mutual face dwell time (in %).

	East Asians M (SD)	Western Caucasians M (SD)
Introduction	61.24 (16.86)	50.10 (17.78)
Storytelling	43.20 (20.79)	29.09 (15.69)

Figure 5. Decile medians of distributions for mutual gaze instances for the introduction (left) and storytelling game (right). Lines represents 95% CI.

Figure 6. Decile medians of distributions for mutual gaze instances for the introduction (left) and storytelling game (right), when blinks are not considered as event offsets. Lines represents 95% CI.

Table 3. Spearman’s correlation coefficients and associated p-values for the relationship between AQ scores and face looking time during speaking and listening periods.

		AQ
		East Asian	Western Caucasian
Speaking	Face looking (Intro)	−0.059; p = 0.718	0.081; p = 0.620
	Face looking (Story)	0.088; p = 0.590	0.041; p = 0.801
Listening	Face looking (Intro)	−0.175; p = 0.280	−0.293; p = 0.067
	Face looking (Story)	0.074; p = 0.651	−0.134; p = 0.410

Figure 7. Descriptive heat maps visualizing cultural differences in face scanning during periods of listening (left) and speaking (right) for the introduction task and storytelling game. Red and blue colours depict regions that East Asians and Western Caucasians scanned more, respectively.

Data availability statement

The raw datasets (scene videos) are not publicly available since they disclose personally identifiable information. However, all processed data analyzed for this study are made available in anonymised form with DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/A7U6D (https://osf.io/a7u6d/).