An Eye Tracking Study of Attention Distribution during Person Perception

Abstract

Interactions between individuals are common and important scenarios in humans’ life. During this process person perception happens. Person perception is a cognitive process when people forming impressions of others. People leverages various methods to generate social cures. Non-verbal visual observations are important ways to collect relevant clues. This study investigates people’s gaze distribution when they observe other individuals and form person perception correspondingly. The specific task in this study is to evaluate others’ occupations. An eye-tracking experiment of 20 participants was conducted. The eye tracker could generate quantitative data and capture subjects’ gazing pattern when they are doing tasks, Participants were divided into two groups. One group viewed a series of photos of females and males. At the same time, they were informed beforehand that they needed to identify the occupations of individuals in the photos demonstrated. The other group was not informed. Participants’ visual attention was recorded by an eye tracker. The results indicate that people pay more initial attention (first fixation duration) to faces when judging occupations. And people pay more attention to faces and outfits in terms of total fixation duration in both groups. Comparing the two groups, people pay less attention to detailed information like accessories when they are forming person perception consciously. The results help improve the understanding of person perception.