Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 24, Issue 7, Pages 1216-1225Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0956797612471684
Keywords
eye movements; face perception; individual differences
Categories
Funding
- NEI NIH HHS [R01 EY015925, EY-015925] Funding Source: Medline
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In general, humans tend to first look just below the eyes when identifying another person. Does everybody look at the same place on a face during identification, and, if not, does this variability in fixation behavior lead to functional consequences? In two conditions, observers had their free eye movements recorded while they performed a face-identification task. In another condition, the same observers identified faces while their gaze was restricted to specific locations on each face. We found substantial differences, which persisted over time, in where individuals chose to first move their eyes. Observers' systematic departure from a canonical, theoretically optimal fixation point did not correlate with performance degradation. Instead, each individual's looking preference corresponded to an idiosyncratic performance-maximizing point of fixation: Those who looked lower on the face performed better when forced to fixate the lower part of the face. The results suggest an observer-specific synergy between the face-recognition and eye movement systems that optimizes face-identification performance.
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