Whether the eyes are "the window of the soul" is     1    ; that they are intensely important in interpersonal communication is a fact.     2    the first two months of a baby’s life, the stimulus that produces a smile is a pair of eyes. The eyes need not be real: a     3    with two dots will produce a smile. Significantly, a real human face with eyes covered will not motivate a smile, nor will the sight of only one eye when the face is presented in     4    . This attraction to eyes     5    opposed to the nose or mouth continues as the baby     6    . In one study, when American four-year-olds were asked to draw people, 75% of them drew people with mouths, but 99% of them drew people with eyes. In Japan, however, where babies are     7    their mother’s back, infants do not acquire as much     8    to eyes as they do in other cultures.     9    , Japanese adults make little use of the face either to encode or decode meaning. In fact, Argyle reveals that the " proper place to     10    one’s gaze during a conversation in Japan is     11    the neck of one’s conversation partner".
    The role of eye     12    in a conversational exchange between two Americans is well defined: speakers make contact with the eyes of their listener for     13    one second, then glance     14    as they talk; in a few moments they re-establish eye contact with the listener or     15    themselves that their audience is still attentive, then shift their gaze away     16    . Listeners,     17    , keep their eyes on the face of the speaker, allowing themselves to glance away only briefly. It is important that they     18    at the speaker at the precise moment when the speaker re-establishes eye contact: if they are not looking, the speaker assumes that they are     19    and either will pause until eye contact is resumed or will end the conversation. Just how critical this eye maneuvering is to the maintenance of conversational     20    becomes evident when two speakers are wearing dark glasses: there may be a sort of traffic jam of words caused by interruption, false starts, and unpredictable pauses.