There is more to eye contact than meets the eye Aki Myllyneva ⇑ , Jari K. Hietanen ⇑ Human Information Processing Laboratory, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, FIN-33014 University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland article info Article history: Received 10 January 2014 Revised 17 September 2014 Accepted 18 September 2014 Keywords: Gaze direction Mental attributions Psychophysiology Eye contact abstract Recent studies have shown enhanced brain and autonomic responses to seeing a face with a direct gaze. Interestingly, greater responses to eye contact vs. averted gaze have been observed when showing ‘‘live’’ faces as stimuli but not when showing pictures of faces on a computer screen. In this study, we provide unequivocal evidence that the differential responses observed in the ‘‘live’’ condition are dependent on the observer’s mental attribu- tions. Results from two experiments showed that eye contact resulted in greater auto- nomic and brain responses compared to averted gaze if a participant believed that the stimulus person sitting on the other side of an electronic shutter was able to see him or her through the shutter. Gaze direction had no effects if participants believed that the transparency from their side was blocked. The results suggest that mental attributions exert a powerful modulation on the processing of socially relevant sensory information. Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Eye contact with another person can have a strong impact on us. Mutual gazing, in addition to mutual touch- ing, has been suggested to be the only mode of actual encounter between two people in a sense that it is only in these activities that ‘‘each person both gives and receives in the same act’’ (Heron, 1970). Encountering a face with a direct gaze not only elicits affective reactions (autonomic arousal) in the observer (Helminen, Kaasinen, & Hietanen, 2011; Nichols & Champness, 1971) but orients attention, facilitates perception, discrimination and mem- ory of facial information (for a review, see Senju & Johnson, 2009), and modulates even cognitive and affective processing of other information concurrently presented in the vicinity (Conty, Gimmig, Belletier, George, & Huguet, 2010; Strick, Holland, & van Knippenberg, 2008). However, seeing a pair of eyes does not always mean that one is taking part in social interaction. In everyday life, we see faces with a direct gaze – for example, in maga- zines, television and advertisements – without encounter- ing any true interaction with another person. It is obvious that it would not be adaptive to react similarly to an unknown face staring at you on the other side of the table and to a face staring at you in a magazine. In recent years, researchers working in the field of social cognition and social neuroscience have become aware that studying social cognition in the laboratory by showing images of other people to passive observers barely touches upon the psychological processes activated when another person is actually present. Researchers have started to ask if the functioning of the social brain network and associated psychological and physiological responses are the same when the experimental participants are looking at a picture or encountering a real person. Furthermore, if differences do exist, what kind of psychological and neural top-down influences are responsible for this modulation (Hietanen, Leppänen, Peltola, Linna-aho, & Ruuhiala, 2008; Risko, Laidlaw, Freeth, Foulsham, & Kingstone, 2012; Schilbach et al., 2013; Teufel, Fletcher, & Davis, 2010)? http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.09.011 0010-0277/Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding authors. Tel.: +358 50 318 6083 (A. Myllyneva), +358 40 190 1384 (J.K. Hietanen). E-mail addresses: aki.myllyneva@uta.fi (A. Myllyneva), jari.hietanen@ uta.fi (J.K. Hietanen). Cognition 134 (2015) 100–109 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT