The mere perception of eye contact increases arousal during a word-spelling task

Abstract

Eye contact is a highly salient and fundamentally social signal. This entails that the mere perception of direct gaze may trigger differentiated neurobehavioral responses as compared to other gaze directions. We investigated this issue using a visual word-spelling task where faces under different gaze directions and head orientations were displayed on-screen concomitantly with the words. We show evidence for automatic increase of skin conductance response (SCR), indicative of arousal, associated with the perception of direct gaze as compared to both averted gaze and closed eyes. Moreover, the perception of averted gaze was associated with an increase of electromyographic (EMG) corrugator activity. These effects were observed in two demanding word-spelling tasks, but not in a simple letter decision task. We propose to interpret these findings in terms of the social value of direct and averted gaze and conclude that some circumstances such as the task at hand may be essential for uncovering the neurobehavioral responses associated with the perception of others’ gaze.

Keywords:

• Gaze perception
• Eye contact
• Skin conductance response
• Corrugator activity
• Social cognition

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an ACI “Systèmes Complexes en SHS” (SCSHS-2004-05) from the Ministère de la Recherche. We thank Jean-Pierre Chevrot and Christian Surcouf for fruitful discussion on the word material. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments on the first version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹Three types of spelling mistakes were used: substitution, addition and suppression mistakes. A substitution mistake consisted in replacing a letter by another one without phonetic modification (e.g., C instead of T in the French word ‘spatial’). An addition mistake consisted in a letter addition without phonetic modification: It could be the doubling of a consonant (e.g., NN instead of N in ‘national’), or the addition of a mute letter (e.g., ‘stupeure’). Finally, a suppression mistake consisted of a letter suppression without phonetic modification: It could be the suppression of a double consonant (e.g., N instead of NN in ‘innover’) or the elision of a mute letter (e.g., ‘engrai’). All these mistakes are common spelling mistakes in French.

²d′ and beta were also examined and yielded similar significant results to %CR – %FA. For simplicity, we just retained the analysis of corrected performances (%CR – %FA).