Principal Investigators: Petra Nieken, Alexander Mädche

Driven by the rise of remote work arrangements, video meeting systems have become an essential tool for facilitating collaboration across geographically distributed teams. Due to their visual component, they allow individuals to see one another, enriching computer-mediated communication with a broad spectrum of nonverbal signals. However, video meetings still lack the richness of nonverbal signals inherent to face-to-face communication, with the absence of gaze information remaining as their most notable limitation. In this study, we conducted a laboratory experiment to examine the impact of a gaze-adaptive video meeting system that bridges this gap between computer-mediated and face-to-face communication. Specifically, we designed two treatments in which teams got to know each other in a video meeting before participating in a repeated Weakest Link Game. In the Baseline treatment, we used a conventional video meeting system that enabled team members to see and hear each other. In the Eye Contact treatment, the system additionally indicated when team members were simultaneously looking at each other’s video feeds. Our results suggest that the option to perceive eye contact in video meetings has the potential to increase team cooperation. In contrast, we observed no significant effects on team coordination. With these findings, we offer theoretical insights into the role of social gaze in facilitating type detection and provide practical implications for improving remote work practices.