Eye contact as an antecedent to compliant behavior.
Say "Look at me" before any request and watch compliance jump two- to three-fold.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Todorov et al. (1984) asked students to look at the teacher before giving any instruction. They ran a multiple-baseline across kids to see if this one small step raised compliance.
No extra prizes or praise were added. The only change was saying "Look at me" first.
What they found
Compliance doubled or even tripled once eye contact was required. The gains showed up right away and stayed while the rule was in place.
How this fits with other research
Rojahn et al. (2012) extends the idea. They taught preschoolers a full starter pack: stop, look, say "yes." Eye contact was still in the mix, but the package worked even when teachers gave no extra rewards.
Prigge et al. (2013) and Speights Roberts et al. (2008) act as successors. They kept the eye-contact cue, then layered on clear short instructions, time-in, and praise. Kids hit 80-96% compliance, showing the cue is a solid first brick, not the whole wall.
Yuwiler et al. (1992) swaps the cue. They used three easy high-p requests instead of eye contact and still lifted compliance. The pattern tells us: grab attention first, but you can pick the style that fits the child.
Why it matters
You can raise compliance tomorrow without new tokens or candy. Start every instruction with "Look at me." If the child needs more, bolt on short clear wording, praise, or a quick high-p sequence. The 1984 cue is still the cheapest, fastest first step in your toolkit.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Many experimenters and practitioners regard eye contact between instructor and learner as a facilitator, if not a prerequisite, to the effective instruction of sighted people. Without scientifically supporting the practice of demanding eye contact, experimenters, nonetheless, advocate its use and offer a variety of procedures to promote its acquisition. To justify the widespread use of demanded eye contact and to explain its role functionally, one experiment and data from six replications with nine subjects are presented. The primary experiment provides an empirical base for the training of eye contact prior to instruction. In a multiple-baseline design across two students demanded eye contact resulted in levels of compliance that were double and triple those of baseline. A tentative functional analysis of demanded eye contact is presented, followed by a discussion of the relationship of eye contact to attending.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1984 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1984.17-553