Pretty sure we are the only animals with pink rings around our mouth. It’s flipping weird.
It probably helps with verbal language understanding as humans often use mouth movements to interpret words (see McGurk effect). But I still think it’s weird.
Big pink rings.
Well humans used to have significantly shorter lifespans so that has to be considered with evolution.
Even though a lot of people use eye contact when speaking 1 to 1. It’s not used as much at farther distance and multiple group speaking.
Eye tracking research shows that we often glance at the mouth often when someone is speaking even if we don’t realize it.
We also can see things in our Peripheral vision that are used in processing but we are not as aware of it.
There was some interesting studies done around covid regarding non-transparent mouth covering and verbal communication.