A new study shows that people are able to detect subtle eye movements that indicate another person's intentions. (Image credit: We Are via Getty Images)
Recent research confirms that people can interpret intentions in each other's gazes, supporting a common belief about human communication.
The study shows how people use their eyes to communicate nonverbally. In future research, this line of research could lead to a deeper understanding of how individuals with conditions that affect social skills, such as autism, perceive these subtle nonverbal cues.
You don’t have to be a psychologist to realize that the eyes convey a lot of information; it’s not for nothing that they say, “The eyes are the window to the soul.” However, scientists have long studied how exactly the brain perceives the smallest eye movements and translates them into an understanding of another person’s thoughts, feelings, or mental state. How can we tell when a look is meaningful and when it’s just a random, insignificant glance?
“We want to understand why our brains process social information differently,” says Jelena Ristic, a professor of psychology at McGill University in Canada and senior author of the study, published in September in the journal Communications Psychology.
In their study, Ristic and her team wanted to understand how people responded to intentional versus unintentional eye movements. First, they recorded people sitting in front of a screen and moving their eyes in response to cues that appeared on the screen. For example, sometimes participants were asked to move their eyes left or right as they chose, while other times they were given direct instructions to look one way or the other.
“The only difference between the conditions was that in one condition, participants made intentional eye movements, and in the other, they made either intentional or unintentional eye movements,” Ristic told Live Science.
The researchers then recruited about 80 participants to watch these recordings, which were cut just before the participants in the video actually moved their eyes. In each clip, the participants were asked to predict whether each person would look left or right.
“They made decisions faster when the looks were intentional,” Ristic said. This difference in prediction speed was only a few milliseconds, but it showed that people process intentional and unintentional looks differently.
In two subsequent experiments, each involving a different set of about 70 participants, the researchers tested whether this difference in processing speed affected how quickly people tracked a person’s gaze on a screen. They might have been quicker to track intentional gazes. But to their surprise, intention didn’t matter, Ristic says.
This suggests that separate processes in the brain may detect the intentionality of a person's gaze and then formulate a response. Or perhaps the intentionality information is gathered later in social interaction, after the viewer has adequately observed the other person's gaze.
The researchers analyzed their videos to see what the participants could see that would help them more quickly predict eye movements before someone in the video intentionally shifted their gaze. According to Ristic, the people in the videos weren’t visible to the naked eye as moving at all. However, when they looked more closely, the researchers found that there was more movement around the eye area before someone decided to change their gaze direction, compared to when they were given instructions on which direction to look. These tiny movements could have been “cues.”
“Based on this, we speculate that these very subtle motion cues are transmitted very quickly to intentionally point them out to others, and that our system [as an observer] is very sensitive to this,” Ristic added.
The next step in the research, she says, will be to use more precise eye-tracking techniques to understand these subtle cues. The researchers also plan to make new videos in which participants are asked to move their eyes with a specific intent — such as helping someone or tricking them — to see if viewers can detect the specific intent behind another person’s gaze.
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Sourse: www.livescience.com
