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Eye contact is a powerful form of nonverbal communication. It allows us to identify others' emotions, such as embarrassment or shame, and track down how attentive or interested one is. You also may have noticed that in deep conversation or when asked tough questions, people tend to break eye contact while they think of a response. A recent Japanese experiment suggests eye contact actually uses up a lot of mental resources and keeping up with it can deplete one's mental bandwidth.
The study showed that direct eye contact was broken when the person was faced with a difficult prompt. In addition, those who maintained eye contact during these difficult types of prompts performed worse compared to those who broke contact. Otherwise, during easy prompts, keeping eye contact had no effect on performance. These results imply that maintaining eye contact hinders one's ability to think or process information, though the link is not yet clear.
In terms of cultural differences, there were no differences found when another study looked at the influence of eye contact on heart rate in Japanese and Finnish participants. However, not much is known about eye contact differences in cultures. If less emphasis on eye contact is linked with deeper thinking and more eye contact is linked with better social feedback then are we losing something in the exchange?
Source material from Scientific American