Assignment Task
Background
Gaze following (i.e., looking at others’ eyes) is a widespread social behaviour and biological process that many animals, including humans, dogs, dolphins, and some birds, adopt (Shepherd, 2010). In a laboratory setting, gaze-following behaviour is often reflected by humans (or other animals) most often looking at the eyes of face images compared to other areas of the images.
Two primary theories explain why primates follow the eyes. The first hypothesis, eyes-are-special, speculates primates’ cortical neural system is preferentially biased towards processing eye information (Birmingham & Kingstone, 2009). In contrast, the face-as-the-centre-of-gravity hypothesis proposes that we gravitate our gaze towards the centre of a face. Because eyes are near the centre of the face, eyes are frequently fixated (Bindemann et al., 2009). The challenge to distinguish the two accounts lies in the fact that eyes are often in the centre of the face for humans and many animals.
Levy, who was a teenager studying at a secondary school when the article “Monsters are people too” (Levy et al., 2013) was published (!!), came up with the idea of using “monster” images (whose eyes are not near the centre of the face, but on the hands or feet etc.) to solve the issue. Levy and two co-authors used three
types of images in the experiment to explore participants’ eye gaze behaviours, the image types were:
1. Human image, with eyes in the centre of the face
2. Humanoid image, creatures with eyes in the centre of the face
3. Monster image, creatures whose eyes are on their hands, feet, tail, or other parts of the body
Levy et al. recruited 22 participants to look at the images naturally (i.e., free viewing) while how and where their eyes move was being recorded by a research-purpose eye-tracking device. This study used a withinsubject design in that each participant viewed all three types of images (12 images in each of the three conditions, 36 images in total) randomly presented to them.
Their research hypotheses were straightforward: if the eyes-are-special hypothesis is true, participants should look at the eyes of images early (i.e., at the very first few fixations) and more often (i.e., a large proportion of the fixations are on the eyes) compare to other areas of the images, and this should hold for Human, Humanoid, and Monster images. In contrast, if the face-as-the-centre-of-gravity hypothesis is true, the proportion of fixations on the eyes should be different between the Human/Humanoid and the Monster images. Levy et al. indeed found that participants fixated at the eyes of all three types of images early and more often, providing compelling evidence supporting the eyes-are-special hypothesis.
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