Abstract
Ss made judgments of whether or not they were being looked in the eye as an E fixated several points on and off their faces.Distance between sender and receiver, sex, and whether the sender made a sequence of fixation sprior to the terminal fixation were variables of interest. The sender-receiver distance produced less effect than predicted from the hypothesis that receiver judgments were determined solely by the discrepancy between the sender’s iris/sclera configuration (ISC) during true eye contact and the current fixation point. There was no stable differencein accuracy as a function of whether the sender’s terminal fixation was preceded by other fixations or not. These findings cast doubt on the belief expressed in recent studies that the ISC can be used to accurately discriminate eye gazes from other gazes. The results also suggest that fixations on some portions of the face yield a judgment of eye contact which might be predicted on the basis of social experience.
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This project was supported by NIMH Grant MJI22020-05 to Marshall M. Haith. The senior author was supported by an NSF graduate fellowship duringthisinvestigation. We thankLouise HainlineDonnee for servingas our E and Fred Morrison for editorial comments.
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Lord, C., Haith, M.M. The perception of eye contact. Perception & Psychophysics 16, 413–416 (1974). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198564
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198564