Looking Beyond the Eye: Pupillary Dilation and its Relationship to Conversational Behavior in Computer-mediated Conversation and Face-to-Face Conversation

Research has demonstrated that pupil dilation can be an effective indicator of human cognition. When two people converse face-to-face, the body language, gaze, eye movements or visual cues in general play an instrumental role in determining the course of the conversation. However, it is not known how our pupils might actually react in a computer mediated conversation. Nine subjects participated in a study conducted at the Interaction Design Lab at School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study was divided into two phases. The first phase consisted of a face-to-face conversation and the second phase consisted of an online chat conversation. An eye tracker was used to obtain pupil dilation measurements in both phases. The graphs generated by the gaze tracker were then compared. Overall, mean pupil dilation was greater in the face-to-face conversation than in the online chat conversation. Implications of this finding for both system design and future research are discussed