Hey, You Looking at Me?

The renowned Spanish magician and magic theorist Juan Tamariz wrote in his classic book that to make an audience feel seen, a performer must extend “imaginary threads from the performer’s eyes to the spectators,” taking care to not break them during the performance.

A new study, published earlier this month, suggests that for spectators to feel that they have eye-to-eye contact with the person onstage, the latter needs not extend imaginary threads from his or her eyes to the eyes of the audience. In fact, we perceive direct eye contact from other people not only when they look us in the eye, but also when they look at any other part of our face.

Shane Rogers, Oliver Guidetti, and their collaborators at Edith Cowan University in Perth, set out to determine whether people experience an ‘eye contact illusion’ during natural conversation, and if so, how strong the misperception might be. They conducted two eye-tracking studies:

In the first experiment, Guidetti engaged in one on one ‘getting acquainted’ conversations with 46 students, with both Guidetti and the student wearing eye-tracking glasses. In one half of the 4-minute conversations, Guidetti looked at the student’s eyes most of the time, and in the other half of the conversations, he looked at the student’s mouth most of the time. The data showed that, whereas mutual face gazing was comparable in the two participant groups, mutual eye contact was much lower. Once the conversation was over, students rated how much eye contact they believed Guidetti had made, and how much they had enjoyed the conversation. Both subject groups produced equivalently high ratings in each measure, indicating that our perception of eye contact during conversation has more to do with mutual face gazing than with actual eye contact.

In the second experiment, 36 pairs of students (all wearing eye-tracking goggles) participated in an ‘eye gaze guessing game,’ where participants alternated the roles of gazer and guesser for 30 experimental trials. In each trial, the gazer looked for about 2 seconds at one of five locations on the guesser’s face: eyes, mouth, nose, forehead, or either ear. Then, the guesser tried to guess the location the gazer had just looked at. The guessers’ accuracy was above chance level, suggesting that people do possess some ability to figure out the location of another person’s gaze when actively watching out for it. However, participants were slanted to guessing ‘eyes’ when unsure.

Based on the combined findings from both experiments, the researchers concluded that, unless people are specifically attending to gaze location, they are not very sensitive to the exact focus of their partner’s gaze upon their face during the course of natural conversation.

The bad news is, your perception of soul-to-soul eye contact with your romantic partner may be all in your head (your soulmate could be looking at your mouth, or even your ear, as they declare their everlasting love). But the good news is, if the act of looking at other people’s eyes makes you anxious, or if you dread speaking in front of an audience, you don’t need to sweat the small stuff. Just look in the general direction of people’s faces and it’ll feel to them like meaningful eye contact. (Feb 22th, 2019, Scientific American)

Ketchup (番茄酱) is a magical little dressing. It has a sweet and salty bite and makes just about any food more appetizing. 【小题1】 So how did ketchup become best friends with French fries? Let’s start at the beginning.

【小题2】In fact, the first ketchup recipe did not include tomatoes! Instead the Chinese made it from salted fish. Doesn’t sound as appetizing as today’s dip, does it?【小题3】 In the 1900s it started making its way to everyone s dinner tables and refrigerators when the Heinz family bottled and sold it. Ketchup underwent another makeover in the 1970s with the rise of high-fructose corn syrup (高果糖玉米糖浆).

America’s favorite way to eat vegetables originated not in France as the name suggests, but in Belgium. When French fries made their way onto the scene in Europe in the early 1800s, ketchup, as we now know it, had not been invented yet. Americans accepted the side dish in the 1930s and enjoyed them fried in beef fat. 【小题4】 There are reports of early adopters dipping their fries in ketchup from as early as the late 1800s, but the trend didn’t take off in America until the 1940s. As the popularity of fast food restaurants grew, so did the desire to dip our fries in that tasty red sauce. Fast food restaurants started serving French fries with ketchup. 【小题5】

Have you ever frequently put off things you should do for various reasons? If so, it is procrastination (拖延). Procrastinators often put off   doing things and leave them to the very last moment. 【小题1】Lazy people simply don’t do anything and are just fine with it. Procrastinators, on the other hand, have the desire to do something but can’t force themselves to start.

You might think procrastination is a bit annoying but fairly harmless. However, long term procrastination has bad effects on your health. Not having seen the doctor when your illness was easier to treat may shorten your life. Just thinking about what you haven’t done may cause discomfort. 【小题2】

Don’t place too much pressure on yourself. “This project has to impress everyone; I really can’t blow this opportunity,”   【小题3】 Overcome this mental block by simply allowing yourself to be imperfect with the next small task. You can always improve your work later.

【小题4】 Concentrating on the size and difficulty of a task will overcome you and promote procrastination. Any work can be broken into smaller steps. The trick is - with each step along the way — to focus on the next achievable tasks. Make sure you can easily imagine the outcome of your small task. Don’t write a book; write a page.

Focus on starting, rather than finishing. For someone who’s having a hard time starting a task, imagining a hard-to-grasp future can be depressing. The solution in this case, then, is to focus on starting. 【小题5】 We all know that if we start, we’ll eventually finish the task.