VISUAL INTERACTION AND DISTANCE

Argyle & Dean (1965) predicted that, as the distance increased between a confederate who stared continuously and a naive subject, so the naive subject would increasingly return the confederate's gaze into the eyes. Their findings were held to support the prediction, but Stephenson & Rutter (1970) offered an alternative explanation. They showed that, in the Argyle & Dean situation, observers are increasingly likely with increasing distance to record as gaze directed at the eyes, gaze which is actually directed away from the eyes. In the present experiment, pairs of naive subjects took up positions equidistant from a one-way screen behind which two cameras were located. Each pair held a 5 min. conversation, nine pairs at 2 ft. apart, nine at 6 ft. and nine at 10 ft. The interactions were recorded on videotape, and four observers subsequently scored Looking and Speech from the recordings for each subject independently. By means of zoom lens photography and a ‘split-screen’ recording technique, it was ensured that any relationship between visual behaviour and distance could not be an artifact of observer performance. The results indicated that, while neither the duration of individuals' Looking nor the number of Looks were significantly affected by distance, the two measures of mutual Looking, namely the duration of eye-contact, and mutual focus (the proportion of a pair's Looking which results in eye-contact), both increased with distance.