Why it's hard to maintain eye contact during conversation

Adults make eye contact through 30-60% of a conversation, on average. Those who have a stake in it maintain eye contact 60-70% of the time. Now, a new study in the journal Cognition finds that those who occasionally have trouble maintaining eye contact do so merely because they’re cogitating.

Scientists at Kyoto University in Japan discovered that maintaining eye contact while processing what a person is saying is sometimes taxing on the brain. The brain finds it difficult to “share cognitive resources,” and so one breaks eye contact in order to better process what’s being said. The problem centers in the verbal processing portion of the brain. Here, both selection and retrieval of words occurs.

To understand the reason why face-to-face conversationalists sometimes break eye contact, researchers recruited 26 volunteers. Each was asked to play a word-association game which entailed staring into a series of faces projected on a computer screen. Some looked right at the person, while others looked away. Here when a noun was selected, say frisbee, a volunteer was asked to reply with a verb, say catch.