Psychology & Psychiatry

Eye contact with your baby helps synchronise your brainwaves

Making eye contact with an infant makes adults' and babies' brainwaves 'get in sync' with each other – which is likely to support communication and learning – according to researchers at the University of Cambridge.

Neuroscience

When eyes meet, neurons start to fire

Their eyes met across a crowded dance floor, causing specialized neurons to begin firing in multiple regions of both brains that are tasked with deriving meaning from a social gaze.

Neuroscience

Brief period of 'blindness' is essential for vision

Fixational eye movements are tiny movements of the eye—so small we humans aren't even aware of them. Yet they play a large role in our ability to see letters, numbers, and objects at a distance.

Autism spectrum disorders

Study shows smartphone app can identify autism symptoms in toddlers

A digital app successfully detected one of the telltale characteristics of autism in young children, suggesting the technology could one day become an inexpensive and scalable early screening tool, researchers at Duke University ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Gaze and pupil dilation can reveal a decision before it's made

The direction in which people look and how dilated their pupils get can reveal the decision they're about to make, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Penn neuroscientist ...

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Gaze

Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, in which a child encountering a mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance. Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced by any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA