PreprintHumans rely heavily on the visual and oculomotor systems during social interactions. This study examined individual differences in gaze behavior in two types of face-to-face social interactions: a screen-based interview and a live interview. The study examined how stable are these individual differences across scenarios and how it relates to individuals’ traits of social anxiety, autism and neuroticism. Extending previous studies, we distinguished between individuals’ tendency to look at the face, and the tendency to look at the eyes if the face was fixated. These gaze measures demonstrated high internal consistencies (correlation between two halves of the data within a scenario) within both the screen-based and live interview scenarios. Furthermore, individuals who had a tendency to look more at the eyes during one type of interview tended to display the same behavior during the other interview type. More socially anxious participants looked less at faces in both scenarios, but no link with social anxiety was observed for the tendency to look at the eyes. This research highlights the robustness of individual variations in gaze behavior across and within interview scenarios, as well as the usefulness of measuring the tendency to look at faces separately from the tendency to look at eyes.

Active vision is a process that involves moving one's gaze to gather detailed visual information for various tasks. Most of the visual information which is processed is extracted from relatively stable periods of the eyes termed fixations. Individuals vary in their fixation durations, however, the factors that contribute to this variability are not fully understood. This study examines two factors that are intrinsic to all instances of fixations – foveal processing time (examined by speed of processing task) and preparation of the next saccade (examined by pro-saccade latency), and their relation to fixation durations that were decomposed using an ex-Gaussian mixture model. Individuals with shorter pro-saccade latencies exhibited shorter (reflected by the μ parameter) and less variable fixations (reflected by the σ parameter) during scene viewing. Individuals with better speed of processing exhibited less variable fixations. The study sheds light on the cognitive factors related to individual differences in eye movements during scene viewing and highlights the importance of considering the observer characteristics in computational models of eye movement.