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Category: Project

Description: In this study, we investigated why people experience social interaction and what factors contributed to the subjective experience of social interaction. In parallel, we also tested whether implying social interaction modulated gaze behavior to faces, specifically the eyes. To imply social interaction, participants received either one of two instructions: 1) they would be presented with a person trough a ‘live’ video-feed, or 2) they would be presented with a video clip of a person. Prior to the experiment, a confederate walked into a separate room to suggest to participants that (s)he was being positioned behind a webcam. In fact, all participants were presented with a pre-recorded clip while we measured gaze behavior with an eye tracker. We found that a relatively large subset of participants who received the live instruction gazed less at the eyes compared to participants who were given the pre-recorded instruction, but this difference was not significant. First-person reports suggest that participants varied greatly in their judgements about whether the person was ‘live’ or not, and why they thought so.