A look is worth a thousand words: Full gaze awareness in video-mediated conversation

Full gaze awareness, defined here as knowing what someone is looking at, might be expected to be a powerful communicative resource when the conversation concerns some object of common interest in the environment. This article sets out to demonstrate this possibility in the context of video-mediated communication. An experiment is reported in which pairs complete a communication task using a novel apparatus that supports full gaze awareness (GA) and mutual gaze (eye contact). This “GA display” was contrasted with 2 control conditions, mutual gaze without full gaze awareness and audio only. The GA display reduced the number of turns and number of words required to complete the task by about 1/2 in comparison with the 2 control conditions. The results of a subsequent conversational games analysis suggest that at least part of this saving comes about because full gaze awareness provides an alternative nonlinguistic channel for checking one's own and the other person's understanding of what was said.