Eye Contact: One Eye or Two?

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Think back: on the occasions when you do make eye contact, do you look at both eyes at the same time, or one eye? I know it's a hard to tell, but I'm really curious. The results could be very meaningful....

Definitely one... looking at them both equally seems bizarre. Why, what do you think it means?

Funny you post on this...I just went to the opthamologist, he asked me " have you always looked at people with one eye? Did you realize you tilt your head a little as well?" I didn't know I did. He asked me what I feel (physicaly) if I look directly at people, and I described it. He said, "young lady, I am sorry you have been in such pain for all these years, what you have is a birth defect called accomidative insufficiency and convergence disorders." He then said he could give me prisms in my glasses which project the images to the side so my eyes don't have to strain to look at things. This is called binocular vision as well and is quite common among autistics and others in the spectrum.

I had suspected the convergence disorder as my son's developmental opthomologist suggsted I get checked, but this guy said I don't accomidate at all...

just some helpful informaion.

From what I know of the visual system there are two answers to the question.

One is what eye you are looking at when talking to someone else.

The other is with what eye you are looking at people.


1. 90% of people look at the others' LEFT eye when talking. This is a product of the way the brain works- it looks to the left side of the face to process information- facial cues and the like.

2. 90% of people also use the left side of their faces for such communication. This means,

a left-eye-looker talking to a left-face-expresser has no trouble communicating.

Communication breaks down in almost any other circumstance except a right-eye-looker talking to a right-face-expresser, which is pretty unusual.

I have a lot of actual data to back this up but no time at the moment.

Personally I know I'm a right-face-expresser. I have to remember to smile more with the left side of my face so others will know I'm smiling- do it with just the right side and they won't be able to tell...

I'll write more about this later I have to go right now. It's a fascinating subject.

You can't look at both eyes at once when speaking. This is a focus trick if you do it to make the other person think you are looking at them. But in order to do this you focus beyond their head so your eyes are wider apart, thus giving the appearance of looking one in the eyes (coincidentally also increasing the apparent interest in the other)

The pair taken broadly, then each in detail, then a cross-comparison of anything odd found in one.

But as an optometrist, my eye contact problems are principally to not continue a professional level of interest outside of work. (for example while travelling on the tube: that can definitely be an invasion of space, even if I have diagnosed a good few diseases that way.)

Nervous individuals coming to see me tend to "flick" gaze: light on one eye, than the other, or away, then back. At close range very few people will look to a pair of eyes. Convergence of both of their own to one object would be the norm.
About one person in thirty is effectively monocular.

I have this regularly. Last week I had a 25 year old with headaches. He'd never had an eye test, but had been diagnosed quite young as having learning difficulties. The reason he'd never been quick at schoolwork was because it was an effort for him to see it! That, and that alone!

I've not seen enough people on the spectrum to know if they have a higher proportion of visual disorders but spotting their own difficulty, and communicating it, may be less easy and result in them tending to be left unhelped rather more than the average.

(It still happens in Down's syndrome, where it is known that high refractive errors are very common)

I'm not sure what it means...

But I trained myself to make eye contact in my teens, and I always looked at both eyes. It was only in the last year that I learned that people usually look only at one eye.

I went into an optometrist. I spent six months in vision therapy. I wear reading glasses now. Life goes on....

You can look at only one eye?

interesting I taught my self to look at peoples eyes when I was a teenager and I look at both always or at the bridge of there nose.

I only look at one eye when I do. I rarely flicker between eyes and I usually focus on the left eye (my left). I often thought about it when I did look at people because I found it really hard to look at both simultaneously unless we were directly facing each other, and even then my eyes usually focus on only one.

One, it's hard to look someone into both of their eyes.

Exactly. This was why I said the results of my question might be meaningful...

Yeah, definitely one with me too (in the rare cases where I'm able to make eye contact)...and I realize it every time. I always feel weird cause I can feel my eyes switching from one eye to the other. I think the only one I've been able to make two-eye contact with is my boyfriend. It's weird.