Abstract
Although eye contact facilitates effective interpersonal exchanges during social interactions, the perception of eye contact is subjective and often inaccurate. To date, the fundamental spatial range of eye contact perception remains unknown. In the present study, a perceiver is asked to press a button to indicate whether eye contact was established when a viewer gazed at either a control point or the perceiver's eyes. The results show that humans have an inherent ability to perceive eye contact within a broad gaze range and that voluntary awareness of eye contact elicits a greater pupil dilation. These findings suggest that the fundamental form of eye contact is one-sided, subjective, and ambiguous even in face-to-face situations.
