Abstract
The eyes are preferentially attended over other facial features and recent evidence suggests this bias is difficult to suppress. To further examine the automatic and volitional nature of this bias for eye information, we used a novel prompting face recognition paradigm in 41 adults and measured the location of their first fixations, overall dwell time and behavioural responses. First, patterns of eye gaze were measured during a free-viewing forced choice face recognition paradigm. Second, the task was repeated but with prompts to look to either the eyes or the mouth. Participants showed significantly more first fixations to the eyes than mouth, both when prompted to look at the eyes and when prompted to look at the mouth. The pattern of looking to the eyes when prompted was indistinguishable from the unprompted condition in which participants were free to look where they chose. Notably, the dwell time data demonstrated that the eye bias did not persist over the entire presentation period. Our results suggest a difficult-to-inhibit bias to initially orient to the eyes, which is superseded by volitional, top-down control of eye gaze. Further, the amount of looking to the eyes is at a maximum level spontaneously and cannot be enhanced by explicit instructions.
Highlights
Surveying a crowded room, your eyes meet with a stranger and you quickly look away
Using t-tests, we found there were no differences between these two conditions, for both first fixations and dwell time, suggesting eye looking is already at maximum capacity in the unprompted condition
We developed a novel prompting paradigm, based around a forced choice face recognition task, to explore how attention is oriented to the eyes and mouth
Summary
Your eyes meet with a stranger and you quickly look away. Making eye contact was not the intention but it happened anyway. Newborns show a preference for direct gaze over averted gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002) as well as open over closed eyes (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000), while by three months infants show a preference for human eyes over nonhuman primate eyes (Dupierrix et al, 2014). This early development of eye processing preferences concurs with evidence that the neural response to the eyes matures in children before the neural response to a full face (Taylor, Edmonds, McCarthy, & Allison, 2001)
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