Eye Aversion and Mental Processing
A study by Phelps, Doherty-Sneddon, and Warnock concluded that children who avoid eye contact while considering their responses to questions are more likely to answer correctly than children who maintain eye contact. According to Doherty-Sneddon:
"Looking at faces is quite mentally demanding. We get useful information from the face when listening to someone, but human faces are very stimulating and all this takes processing. So when we are trying to concentrate and process something else that's mentally demanding, it's unhelpful to look at faces."Contrariwise, Doherty-Sneddon suggests that a blank stare indicates a lack of understanding.
Read more about this topic: Eye Contact
Famous quotes containing the words eye, aversion and/or mental:
““Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction?
Or the glistening eye to the poison of a smile?”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“... prejudice marks a mental land mine.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)