05.04.2024 Why are you (not) looking me in the eye?

Analysis of eye movements: whether people fixate the eye or the mouth in one face is related to their general gaze tendencies

If you look at the upper area of objects first, you will also do the same with faces: the points of view of an “up looker” are shown in blue, the points of view of a “down looker” in red.
Foto: Frieder Hartmann

People look at faces in an individual way, some tend to focus on the eyes, others on the middle of the face or mouth. Until now, psychologists have associated such preferences with aspects of social behaviour. Social anxiety or autism spectrum disorders can lead to avoidance of eye contact. Researchers at the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen (JLU) have now discovered a surprising connection: Our individual way of looking at faces is linked to how we look at objects. The results of the study have been published in the renowned journal PNAS.

The researchers recorded eye movements of hundreds of volunteers looking at images of everyday scenes. This allowed the analysis of over 1.8 million eye movements that fell on faces or inanimate objects. There was an unexpected correlation: participants who tended to focus on the eye area, that is, looking at the upper part of a face, also focused their eyes more on inanimate objects. Those who looked more often in the eyes also looked at higher areas of a can of cola or neon signs. People who tended to fix the mouth area were exactly the opposite.

Maximilian Broda, first author of the study and doctoral student in the Department of General Psychology at JLU, explains: "Our participants differed reliably in their tendency to look higher or lower at all kinds of objects. Contrary to what we thought, this was not only true for faces." His doctoral supervisor Prof. Ben de Haas, Ph.D., adds:  "We still don’t know why some people fix higher areas than others. But probably there are very basic mechanisms of individual biology in the background." The scientists are currently examining, for example, the role that visual resolution plays in different areas of the retina.

"Our results suggest that basic mechanisms of visual processing could have far-reaching consequences for human interaction and even developmental disorders," says de Haas. "This study shows the need to work more closely with researchers from other fields, such as clinical psychology."

 

Publication
Maximilian Davide Broda and Benjamin de Haas:
Individual differences in human gaze generalize from faces to objects.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Vol., 121 | No.,
published online on 12 March 2024.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2322149121

 

contact
Maximilian Broda
Department of General Psychology at JLU
E-mail:

Ben de Haas, Ph.D.
Department of General Psychology at JLU
E-mail:

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