Work From Home video calling, where is employee's attention? Read to know

Coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people around the world. It has led to lockdown in many countries. Companies are being shut and several has given work from home such. In this scenario, video conferencing apps are blooming as employees are doing video call to conduct meetings. But the question is where everyone's attention remains during the video calls. Read to know more.  

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Gazing during video call

COVID-19 has resulted in increased video calls as people are working from home during the lockdown. According to reports by an online portal, a neuroscientist from Florida Atlantic University have found that a person's gaze changes during video calls if they think that the person on the other end of the conversation can see them.

The phenomenon is known as "gaze cueing." It is a powerful signal for orienting attention. It is a mechanism that likely plays a role in the developmentally and socially important wonder of 'shared' or 'joint' attention where a number of people attend to the same location or object.

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Associate professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University Elan Barenhtolz said that as gaze direction conveys so much socially relevant information, one's own gaze behaviour is likely to be affected by whether one's eyes are visible to a speaker. For instance, people might intend to signal that they are paying more attention to a speaker by focusing on their face or eyes during a conversation. Barenholtz explained that more eye contact can also be perceived as aggressive and therefore noticing one's eyes could lead to reduced direct fixation of another's face or eyes. People engage in ignoring eye movements by regularly breaking and reforming eye contact during conversations.

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For the study, published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, a team compared fixation behaviour in 173 participants under two conditions. In one, the participants believed they were engaging in real-time interaction. The other was a pre-recorded call, but the participants were told that it was a live-interaction. The researchers wanted to find out if face fixation would boost in the real-time condition based on the social norms of facing one's speaker in order to get attention or if it would lead to greater face ignorance, based on social expectation as well as the cognitive demands of encoding the conversation.

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The conclusion came out to be that when the face was fixated, attention was directed toward the mouth for the greater percentage of time in the pre-recorded condition versus the real-time condition.