Emotional content influences eye-movements under natural but not under instructed conditions

Abstract

In everyday life, people can freely decide if and where they would like to move their attention and gaze, often influenced by physical and emotional salience of stimuli. However, many laboratory paradigms explicitly instruct participants when and how to move their eyes, leading to unnatural instructed eye-movements. The current preregistered study compared eye-movements to peripherally appearing faces with happy, angry and neutral expressions under natural and instructed conditions. Participants reliably moved their eyes towards peripheral faces, even when they were not instructed to do so; however, eye-movements were significantly slower under natural than under instructed conditions. Competing central stimuli decelerated eye-movements independently of instructions. Unexpectedly, the emotional salience only affected eyemovements under natural conditions, with faster saccades towards emotional than towards neutral faces. No effects of emotional expression occurred when participants were instructed to move their eyes. The study shows that natural eye-movements significantly differ from instructed eye-movements and emotion-driven attention effects are reduced when participants are artificially instructed to move their eyes, suggesting that research should investigate eye-movements under natural conditions.

Using Gaze for Behavioural Biometrics

“…In this realm, internal consistency and temporal stability of gaze events (e.g., saccades) have gained currency to define endophenotypes of specific disorders [ 136 ]; furthermore, a signature in terms of explainable parameters is likely to help interpreting distorted eye movements in psychiatric patients in terms of functional brain systems. Other examples can be easily gathered from recent developments in emotion [ 137 , 138 , 139 ] and personality research [ 72 , 140 , 141 , 142 , 143 ].…”

Visual competition attenuates emotion effects during overt attention shifts

“…Such differences cannot be avoided if natural differences in overt attention shifts are studied. Yet, we believe that natural shifts of attention are highly important to consider for translational implications and that looking into overt shifts of attention is one step toward studying more natural shifts as participants are no longer instructed to inhibit natural eye‐movements (Kulke & Pasqualette, 2022). In everyday life, an abundance of different objects is constantly competing for our attention and for fixation.…”