New research charts the surprisingly widespread response in multiple brain areas when the eyes of two individuals meet and social gaze interaction happens.
“There are strong robust signals in the brain that are signatures of an interactive social gaze,” says Steve Chang, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Yale University, a member of the Wu-Tsai Institute and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience, and the senior author of the study.
The phenomenon of extracting meaning in the gaze between two people has been documented in art and literature for millennia but scientists have had a difficult time uncovering how the brain accomplishes such a subtle feat….