Helping children think: deliberately averting your gaze as a learning strategy
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Thinking skills
What is ‘gaze aversion’?
Gaze aversion is the act of looking away while thinking. This commonly happens when people are concentrating, reflecting or speaking. For example, gaze aversion is likely to occur when someone is searching their memory or doing mental arithmetic. People often avert their eyes, especially from faces and other distracting stimuli such as TVs, while they are thinking. Gaze aversion tends not to be used when listening to someone speak, because the listener wants/needs access to the visual cues which accompany speech, such as gestures and facial expressions.
Previous research has shown that the use of gaze aversion can be taught and tends to increase as people tackle increasingly difficult tasks. It has also been suggested that gaze aversion is an overt sign of thinking (cognitive activity). Previous research has also shown that gaze aversion while thinking can significantly benefit performance, especially when working on challenging problems.
