Social Gaze in Team Collaboration: Multiparty Eye-Tracking and Gaze-Adaptive Video Meeting Systems

In the modern workplace, video meeting systems are essential for enabling collaboration among geographically distributed teams. Despite their benefits, video meetings lack the nonverbal richness of face-to-face communication. Although virtual team members can see each other’s faces, they cannot discern what others are visually attending to, impairing their ability to infer intentions and prosocial motives. While previous studies have focused on the role of social gaze dynamics (e.g., eye contact) in building trust and relationships, their impact on economic behavior within teams has been neglected.
Bridging this research gap requires an interdisciplinary approach that integrates insights into the communicative function of gaze, state-of-the-art eye-tracking methods, and behavioral economics.
This dissertation encompasses a systematic literature review and three controlled
laboratory experiments on the role of social gaze in team collaboration across
face-to-face and video meeting settings. The review introduces a clear conceptualization of multiparty eye-tracking, outlining key considerations for synchronously capturing the eye movements of multiple individuals engaged in team collaboration. ... mehrIn addition, it offers a comprehensive overview of established procedures for quantifying social gaze dynamics. The first experiment examined the emergence and impact of social gaze dynamics in face-to-face team collaboration, while the second experiment extended this analysis to compare the effects across face-to-face and video meeting settings. The third experiment explored the impact of a gaze-adaptive video meeting system that bridges the gap between computer-mediated and face-to-face communication by visualizing episodes of bidirectional eye contact in real time.
The results from these experiments revealed considerable differences in the emergence and impact of social gaze between face-to-face and video meeting settings. In face-to-face meetings, eye-directed gaze was reciprocated more than twice as often, significantly promoting cooperative behavior. In contrast, the absence of gaze information in conventional video meeting systems negated this positive effect, raising concerns about increasingly relying on video meetings in the modern workplace.
Notably, enabling the perception of bidirectional gaze contact during video meetings
enhanced cooperation in virtual teams, highlighting its potential to compensate for the lack of nonverbal richness. These findings provide valuable insights into the
communicative function of social gaze in team collaboration and offer practical guidance for optimizing team communication to promote organizational success.