Video meetings can often be hard work, with so-called Zoom fatigue a consequence of having to stare at ourselves for so long.  As a growing body of research examines the nature of our newly remote world, there is a gradually emerging understanding of what it takes to thrive.

For instance, recent research from Iowa State University examines where our attention tends to focus during a video meeting.  The study shows that while participants were generally paying attention to the speaker, they would often drift, especially during small group meetings.

Virtual attention

The researchers recruited volunteers to sit in a windowless room during a couple of video calls, the first of which involved a 15 minute Webex meeting with three colleagues and a fake user who participated without either video or audio.  During the meeting, the research team introduced a range of distractions to try and disturb the focus of the volunteers.

The second experiment asked the volunteers to watch a 10 minute recorded Zoom call featuring a city council meeting with about two dozen participants.  Each time someone new spoke, the user frame shifted to focus on that person.

During each experiment, eye-tracking technology monitored where participants were looking and for how long.

“The eye-tracking gave us the opportunity to objectively record what people actually look at during one of these videoconference meetings, and we learned some surprising things,” the researchers explain.

Wandering attention

The data revealed that during the small group session, people spent around a third of the time looking somewhere other than the screen.  This compares to just 11% of the time doing likewise during the larger group recording.  As expected, the participants were distracted by the various distractions introduced by the researchers, albeit only for a few seconds before returning to the focus of the session.

The researchers believe that while we have generally adapted well to the extensive use of video meetings during the pandemic, the format remains somewhat unnatural to us, which causes various problems.

“How many in-person meetings have you been to where you sit on one side of the table, and everyone else sits on the other side of the table and looks at you the whole time? That would drive people crazy. We may see reactions from people across from us or turn our head when someone speaks, but we don’t see everyone’s face at the same time,” they explain.