Faces Not as Attention Grabbing as We Think

 Very interesting study and implications.

Why Faces might Not be as attention-grabbing as we think

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19 JAN 2023  By Ben Night

Research combining wearable eye-tracking technology and AI body detection software suggests our eyes aren’t drawn to the faces of passers-by as much as previously thought.

Data from the study’s 30 participants revealed they looked at the faces of just 16 per cent of the people they walked past.  

Faces are key to everyday social interaction. Just a brief glance can give us important signals about someone’s emotional state, intentions and identity that helps us to navigate our social world.

But researchers studying social attention – how we notice and process the actions and behaviours of others in social contexts – have been mostly limited to lab-based studies where participants view social scenes on computer screens. Now, researchers from the School of Psychology at UNSW Science have developed a new approach that could enable more studies of social attention in natural settings.

 The novel method correlates eye-movement data from wearable eye-tracking glasses with analysis from an automatic face and body detection algorithm to record when and where participants looked when fixating on other people. The methodology, detailed in the journal Scientific Reports , could have a range of future applications in settings from clinical research to sports science.  ... '