A poor quality video link affects speech but not gaze

Thirty two members of the general public worked remotely from one another in pairs on some simple joint tasks. All the pairs had high quality audio links and were able to see one another’s faces through an on-screen video image. For half the pairs this image was small (40 x 65 mm) and for the other half it was large (103 x 140mm). The conversations were analysed in terms of gaze focus (looking at the video image or elsewhere) and speech (speaking or silent). It is concluded that the small video image results in more formal and less fluent verbal interaction but gaze behaviour is unaltered