The effects of familiarity and facial occlusion on social gaze dynamics in natural dyadic interactions.

Although gaze information is important for human interactions, recent studies show that in natural exchanges, mutual face-to-face looks occur relatively infrequently, on less than 15% of interaction time. In the present study, we conducted two dyadic interaction experiments utilizing dual mobile eye-tracking eyeglasses to examine if the prevalence of mutual face-to-face looks may be affected by interactive context. In Experiment 1, we strengthened the interactive context by measuring looking behaviours in dyads of friends. In Experiment 2, we weakened the interactive context by measuring looking behaviours in dyads of strangers interacting under facial visual occlusion. In both experiments, we found that mutual looks continued to occur rarely, on 7% of interaction time in Experiment 1 and 4% of interaction time in Experiment 2. Thus, changes in the interactive context appear not to affect the overall low prevalence of mutual looking in natural interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).