Abstract
Following Yarbus's findings of instructions influencing scene exploration, [Yarbus, 1967 Eye
Movements and Vision (New York: Plenum)] we measured eye movements in participants viewing
pictures from children's story books. Three kinds of instructions were used: (a) Scenario with
feelings: can you tell me what is happening and what the people are feeling? (b) Object-based:
eg how many people are wearing yellow? (c) Individual emotion: eg how do you think the person
in the front feels? Eye-movement patterns differed significantly between these three sets of
instructions, specifically with respect to fixation frequencies for faces. As expected, face fixations
were significantly more common in `individual emotion' than `scenario with feelings' conditions,
and both emotional conditions showed more fixations to faces than the object condition. Surpris-
ingly, however, face fixations reached 30% of total fixations even in the object condition. In
emotional but not object-based conditions, women looked significantly more often at faces than
did men. Results are discussed with respect to social influences on visual cognition, and possible
implications for autism.
| Translated title of the contribution | Eye movements for pictures of social scenes - instructions do not prevent fixation of faces |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Pages | 28 - 28 |
| Number of pages | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 2007 |