Browsing by Author "Jarick, Michelle"
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Item Eye contact is a two way street: arousal is elicited by the sending and receiving of gaze signals(2019) Jarick, Michelle; Bencic, ReneeResearch shows that arousal is significantly enhanced while participants make eye contact with a live person compared to viewing a picture of direct or averted gaze. Recent research has pointed toward the potential for social interaction as a possible driving force behind the arousal enhancement. That is, eye gaze is not only a signal perceived but also a signal sent out in order to communicate with others. This study aimed to test this by having dyads engage in eye contact and averted gaze naturally, while wearing sunglasses, and while blindfolded; such that the gaze signals were clear, degraded, and blocked, respectively. Autonomic nervous system arousal was measured via skin conductance response and level. The results showed that dyads exhibited the highest degree of arousal (increased skin conductance) while making eye contact (send/receive) compared to send-only or receive-only gaze trials; however, this was only the case if eye contact was clear. Once gaze information became degraded (by sunglasses or blindfold), arousal significantly decreased and was no longer modulated by the sending and receiving of gaze. Therefore, the arousal enhancement observed during eye contact is not only caused by receiving gaze signals (the focus of previous research) and should be more accurately attributed to the subtle interplay between sending and receiving gaze signals.Item Socially communicative eye contact and gender affect memory(2019) Lanthier, Sophie N.; Jarick, Michelle; Zhu, Mona J. H.; Byun, Crystal S. J.; Kingstone, AlanBecause of their value as a socially communicative cue, researchers have strived to understand how the gaze of other people influences a variety of cognitive processes. Recent work in social attention suggests that the use of images of people in laboratory studies, as a substitute for real people, may not effectively test socially communicative aspects of eye gaze. As attention affects many other cognitive processes, it is likely that social attention between real individuals could also affect other cognitive processes, such as memory. However, from previous work alone, it is unclear whether, and if so how, socially communicative eye gaze affects memory. The present studies test the assumption that socially communicative aspects of eye gaze may impact memory by manipulating the eye gaze of a live speaker in the context of a traditional recognition paradigm used frequently in the laboratory. A female (Experiment 1) or male (Experiment 2) investigator read words aloud and varied whether eye contact was, or was not, made with a participant. With both female and male investigators, eye contact improved word recognition only for female participants and hindered word recognition in male participants. When a female investigator prolonged their eye contact (Experiment 3) to provide a longer opportunity to both observe and process the investigator’s eye gaze, the results replicated the findings from Experiments 1 and 2. The findings from Experiments 1–3 suggest that females interpret and use the investigator’s eye gaze differently than males. When key aspects from the previous experiments were replicated in a noncommunicative situation (i.e., when a video of a speaker is used instead of a live speaker; Experiment 4), the memory effects observed previously in response to eye gaze were eliminated. Together, these studies suggest that it is the socially communicative aspects of eye gaze from a real person that influence memory. The findings reveal the importance of using social cues that are communicative in nature (e.g., real people) when studying the relationship between social attention and memory.Item Time estimation during mutual eye gaze(2017) Sliwkanich, Laura; Jarick, MichelleEye contact requires attention both when we send and receive gaze signals. Previous research suggests that when one is attending to something their perception of time is altered, such that time passes by more slowly while watching a pot boil. The disruption of time perception has been shown to happen during face-to-face eye contact but has also been observed (albeit to a lesser extent) if one person is looking at another or being looked at by another [Jarick et al., 2016]. Here, we aimed to tease apart whether eye contact is more attention-capturing when we are sending signals during mutual gaze or receiving the gaze signal, or both. This will be investigated by having pairs of participants (sitting side-by-side) make subjective time estimates of 40, 60, and 80 seconds during the participation of four gaze trials: looking away from one another (baseline), looking at the profile of their partner, being looked at by their partner and making eye contact. If attention is equally attributed to sending and receiving signals, we predict that the degree to which time estimation is disrupted during the profile and looked at trials will sum to the disruption found during eye contact trials. Alternatively, if attention is captured more by sending or receiving gaze signals, then we should see time estimation more disrupted in either the profile or looked at trials. This research will allow us to further understand how attention is allocated during face-to-face eye contact in the wild.