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Eye contact is something that we do ever since we're born. Have you looked at a baby watching her mother?

What are the mechanisms of mutual gaze, or eye contact between two people? They also tend to pay joint attention to a third person. While eye contact is fundamental to face-to-face interaction, shared attention or its foundation is not clear.

According to a team of researchers at the National Institute of Physiological Science (NIPS) in Japan, eye contact affects human interaction. With mutual eye contact there would be synchronised activity in specific areas of their brains.

The team studied 96 voluntary strangers. They were put through scenarios that involved "consistent and sustained eye contact", according to a press release.

Three sets of experiments over two days were conducted on them.

In the first test, they were asked to maintain eye contact under "varying conditions and scenarios". Functional MRI could monitor their brains.

"We expected that eye-blink synchronization would be a sign of shared attention when performing a task requiring joint attention, and the shared attention would be retained as a social memory," Takahiko Koike, an author of the study, said. Koike also stated that the team expected an activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), a part of the frontal lobe that deals with language processing and inhibition control, in both the initiator and respondent of the gaze.

In these cases, both parties showed "synchronized eye-blinks, as well as inter-brain synchronization within the IFG".

Researchers saw that eye-blinks led to mutual gaze, rather than common activity. They showed that it was thought to be important in "face-to-face social interactions".

While mutual eye contact brings participants into a "singular, connected system", more research is needed to establish it, according to the senior author, Norihiro Sadato.

"Based on the enhancement of behavioral and neural synchronization during mutual gaze, we now know that shared attention is hard to establish without eye contact," he said. "Further investigation into the workings of eye contact may reveal the specific functional roles of neural synchronization between people."