Abstract
Human behaviour is not only influenced by the physical presence of others, but also implied social presence. This study examines the impact of awareness of being eye-tracked on eye movement behaviour in a laboratory setting. During a classic yes/no face recognition task, participants were made to believe that their eye movements were recorded (or not recorded) by eye trackers. Their looking patterns with and without the awareness of being eye-tracked were compared while perceiving social (faces, faces-and-bodies) and non-social (inanimate objects) video stimuli. Area-of-interest (AOI) analysis revealed that misinformed participants (who were not aware that their eye movements were being recorded) looked more at the body (chest and waist) compared to informed participants (who believed they were being eye-tracked), whereas informed participants fixated longer on the mouth and shorter on the eyes of female models than misinformed participants did. These findings highlight the potential impact of an awareness of being eye tracked on one’s eye movement pattern when perceiving a social stimulus. We conclude that even within laboratory settings an eye tracker may function as an implied social presence that leads individuals to modify their eye movement behaviour according to socially-derived inhibitory norms.
Highlights
Attending to social cues and learning to interact with others are vital skills to develop in order to function successfully in society
Previous studies have demonstrated the psychological effect of being watched by others as an effective tool in altering social behaviour, the present experiment sought to investigate whether the awareness of eyetracking could influence individuals’ eye movement behaviour in a laboratory setting
Eye-tracking results did not reveal any significant difference in average viewing time and fixation counts between the informed and misinformed groups when presented with videos of inanimate objects, indicating that having the awareness of eye tracking did not influence how participants would look at a neutral inanimate stimulus
Summary
Attending to social cues and learning to interact with others are vital skills to develop in order to function successfully in society. Researchers have focused on the characteristics of individuals’ looking behaviour while engaged in social tasks (e.g. face recognition task). Social attention refers to the manner in which people attend to biologically relevant stimuli, in particular conspecifics (Freeth, Foulsham, & Kingstone, 2013). Studying where people look has become one of the more widely-used. Received May 15, 2019; Published August 5, 2019. Eye tracker as an implied social presence: awareness of being eye-tracked induces prosocial looking behaviour.
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