Eye movements for pictures of social scenes - instructions do not prevent fixation of faces

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.