We don’t always take faces at their value

THEY’RE plucked and trimmed and injected and sculpted and painted to impress but new research suggests passers-by are as likely to look at a stranger’s elbows as they are their face.

Researchers from the University of NSW School of Psychology have been investigating social attention, or how much people notice other people, using a combination of wearable eye-tracking technology and artificial intelligence body detection software.

While it had long been thought that a person’s eyes were drawn to another’s face, where they can interpret important signals about someone’s emotional state, intentions and identity, the results of the study suggest it isn’t necessarily always the case.

While objects that have faces do attract more attention than those that don’t, it seems it doesn’t correlate that they are the focus of a person’s gaze.

Data from a relatively small pool of 30 participants reveals they looked at the faces of just 16 per cent of the people they walked past in a 20-minute circular route while wearing the mobile eye-tracking device.

“There were also significant differences between individuals in their social orientation, with some looking at almost everyone they passed and others not at all,” said Associate Professor David White, study author and lead investigator at the Face Research Lab.

“The reasons for these individual differences are unknown but prior work where participants viewed social scenes on computer screens suggest that these differences are related to people’s genetics.”

The study participants were more likely to fixate on people when their faces were in full view, he said, but contrary to existing evidence, faces held focus no more than other body regions such as legs.

“There’s some evidence in the literature that faces are more likely to grab our gaze when looking straight on,” Associate Professor White said.

“But we found that although participants were more likely to look at a person when their face is straight on, they’re no more likely to look at the face per se, just that we were more likely to fixate anywhere on the person’s body.”

Until now, research into social attention had been mostly limited to lab-based studies, but this new method of investigating interactions “in the wild” with “millisecond precision” has been revelatory, Associate Professor White said.

The method correlates eye-movement data from the wearable eye-tracking glasses with analysis from an automatic face and body detection algorithm to record when and where participants look when fixating on other people.

The methodology, detailed in the journal Scientific Reports, could have a range of future applications in settings ranging from clinical research to sports science.

A planned larger follow-up study will determine if the findings reflect a broader population and are associated with other aspects of cognition, like social anxiety.

– BY KATELYN CATANZARITI/ AAP