Interactions between individuals are common and important scenarios in humans’ life.  During this process person perception happens. Person perception is a cognitive process when people forming impressions of others. People leverages various methods to generate social cures. Non-verbal visual observations are important ways to collect relevant clues. This study investigates people’s gaze distribution when they observe other individuals and form person perception correspondingly. The specific task in this study is to evaluate others’ occupations. An eye-tracking experiment of 20 participants was conducted. The eye tracker could generate quantitative data and capture subjects’ gazing pattern when they are doing tasks, Participants were divided into two groups. One group viewed a series of photos of females and males. At the same time, they were informed beforehand that they needed to identify the occupations of individuals in the photos demonstrated. The other group was not informed. Participants’ visual attention was recorded by an eye tracker. The results indicate that people pay more initial attention (first fixation duration) to faces when judging occupations. And people pay more attention to faces and outfits in terms of total fixation duration in both groups. Comparing the two groups, people pay less attention to detailed information like accessories when they are forming person perception consciously. The results help improve the understanding of person perception.

Liu Qianrui. An Eye Tracking Study of Attention Distribution during Person Perception. The Frontiers of Society, Science and Technology (2023) Vol. 5, Issue 1: 10-14. https://doi.org/10.25236/FSST.2023.050102.

[1] Fiske, S.T. (2019) Social Beings: Core motives in social psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 

[2] Moskowitz, G. B., & Gill, M. J. (2013). Person perception. In D. Reisberg (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive psychology (pp. 918–942). Oxford University Press. https: // doi. org/ 10. 1093/ oxfordhb/ 9780195376746.013.0058

[3] Freeth, M., Foulsham, T., & Kingstone, A. (2013). What Affects Social Attention? Social Presence, Eye Contact and Autistic Traits. PLoS ONE, 8(1), e53286. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0053286

[4] Phutela, D. (2015). The Importance of Non-Verbal Communication. Ssrn.com. https: // papers. ssrn. com/ sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2715432

[5] Smith, E. R., & Collins, E. C. (2009). Contextualizing person perception: Distributed social cognition. Psychological Review, 116(2), 343–364. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015072

[6] Clark, A. (2001). Being there: putting brain, outfit, and world together again. Cambridge, Mass. Mit.

[7] Gibson, J. J. (2015). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press. (Original work published 1979)

[8] Nielsen, J. P., & Kernaleguen, A. (1976). Influence of Clothing and Physical Attractiveness in Person Perception. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 42(3), 775–780. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1976.42.3.775

[9] Dittmar, H., & Pepper, L. (1994). To have is to be: Materialism and person perception in working-class and middle-class British adolescents. Journal of Economic Psychology, 15(2), 233–251. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-4870(94)90002-7

[10] Hunt, J. M., Kernan, J. B., & Mitchell, D. J. (1996). Materialism As Social Cognition: People, Possessions, and Perception. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 5(1), 65–83. https: // doi. org/ 10. 1207/ s15327663jcp0501_04

[11] Birmingham, E., Bischof, W. F., & Kingstone, A. (2008). Social Attention and Real-World Scenes: The Roles of Action, Competition and Social Content. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(7), 986–998. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470210701410375

[12] Zuobin, Wen, Fang-Fang, Song, Jing-Jing, & Dai, Tao-Tao. (2019). Characteristics, dimensions, and psychological effects of social categorization. Advances in Psychological Science, 27(1), 141.

[13] Howlett, N., Pine, K., Orakçıoğlu, I., & Fletcher, B. (2013). The influence of clothing on first impressions. Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, 17(1), 38–48. https://doi.org/10.1108/13612021311305128

[14] Guy Thomas Buswell. (1987). How people look at pictures: a study of the psychology of perception in art (p. 72). University Microfilms International.

[15] Freeman, J. B., Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2009). The cultural neuroscience of person perception. Progress in Brain Research, 178(0079-6123), 191–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0079-6123(09)17813-5

[16] Hadders-Algra, M. (2022). Human face and gaze perception is highly context specific and involves bottom-up and top-down neural processing. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 132, 304–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.11.042

[17] Hofstede, G., & Minkov, M. (2017). Cultures and organizations: software of the mind: intercultural cooperation and its importance for survival. Mtm.