Violence reduces attention to faces and draws attention to points of contact

Abstract

Although violence is a frequently researched topic, little is known about how different social features influence information gathering from violent interactions. Regions of an interaction that provide contextual information should receive more attention. We predicted the most informative features of a violent social interaction would be faces, points of contact, and objects being held. To test this, we tracked the eyes of 90 participants as they viewed images of social interactions that varied with respect to violence. When viewing violent interactions, participants attended significantly less to faces and significantly more to points of contact. Moreover, first-fixation analysis suggests that some of these biases are present from the beginning of scene-viewing. These findings are the first to demonstrate the visual relevance of faces and contact points in gathering information from violent social interactions. These results also question the attentional dominance of faces in active social scenes, highlighting the importance of using a variety of stimuli and contexts in social cognition research.

Introducing Point-of-Interest as an alternative to Area-of-Interest for fixation duration analysis

“…The central dot served as an implicit required fixation location [31] where the participants had to fixate their gaze to aim and click the mouse cursor [32]. Since gazing at the central dot in the pre-stimulus period carried over to the first fixations, this allowed Scrivner et al [11] to check the quality of the eye movement data at the trial level and to drift-correct the eye movement data based on the first fixations of each trial.…”

“…This study used a previously collected eye-tracking dataset with 72 images and 90 participants [11]. This dataset is publically available and can be downloaded from the Center for Open Science (https://osf.io/sfyj2/).…”

“…This dataset is publically available and can be downloaded from the Center for Open Science (https://osf.io/sfyj2/). Scrivner et al [11] used AOI dwell time analysis for statistical testing. In this study, we analyzed whether the results of this study can be replicated using WSD analysis instead of the AOI dwell time analysis.…”

“…Scrivner et al [11] defined three types of AOIs for their analysis -faces, points of contact, and objects. They defined the AOIs by drawing ellipses surrounding the objects of interest (see Fig 2 a for an example).…”

“…Additionally, this approach naturally circumvents the problem of AOIs as dichotomous classification since there are no hard boundaries in this method and all fixations are weighted differently by their distance to the POIs. As an illustration of WSD analysis, we applied the POI-based method to a study that used AOI dwell time analysis [11]. We show that the results of this study can be replicated using WSD.…”