Why you break eye contact

Researchers in Japan suggest there's a surprising neurological reason why people avert their gaze occasionally during conversation. Reporting in the journal Cognition, they write that eye contact actually "disrupts resources available to cognitive control processes during verb generation." In other words, when you need to come up with certain words under certain circumstances, maintaining eye contact depletes the very brain resources you need to find the word. To test this, the researchers asked 26 participants to make eye contact with a computer-generated face while playing a word association game, reports Business Insider. Looking at the face didn't seem to interfere with their ability to come up with verbs easily associated to nouns--like the word "scissors" prompting the person to think of "cut."