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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the keep-an-eye-on-you dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A tilt of the head facilitates social engagement, researchers say

Scientists have known for decades that when we look at a face, we tend to focus on the left side of the face we're viewing, from the viewer's perspective. Called the "left-gaze bias," this phenomenon is thought to be rooted in the brain, the right hemisphere of which dominates the face-processing task.

Researchers also know that we have a terrible time "reading" a face that's upside down. It's as if our neural circuits become scrambled, and we are challenged to grasp the most basic information. Much less is known about the middle ground, how we take in faces that are rotated or slightly tilted¬.

"We take in faces holistically, all at once—not feature by feature," said Davidenko. "But no one had studied where we look on rotated faces."

Davidenko used eye-tracking technology to get the answers, and what he found surprised him: The left-gaze bias completely vanished and an "upper eye bias" emerged, even with a tilt as minor as 11 degrees off center.

"People tend to look first at whichever eye is higher," he said. "A slight tilt kills the left-gaze bias that has been known for so long. That's what's so interesting. I was surprised how strong it was."

[...] The effect is strongest when the rotation is 45 degrees. The upper-eye bias is much weaker at a 90-degree rotation. "Ninety degrees is too weird," said Davidenko. "People don't know where to look, and it changes their behavior totally."

Davidenko's findings appear in the latest edition of the journal Perception, in an article titled "The Upper Eye Bias: Rotated Faces Draw Fixations to the Upper." His coauthors are Hema Kopalle, a graduate student in the Department of Neurosciences at UC San Diego who was an undergraduate researcher on the project, and the late Bruce Bridgeman, professor emeritus of psychology at UCSC.

More information: Nicolas Davidenko et al. The Upper Eye Bias: Rotated Faces Draw Fixations to the Upper Eye, Perception (2018). DOI: 10.1177/0301006618819628


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:16PM (#781155)

    as far back as the past century or so.

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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:18AM

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:18AM (#781383) Journal

    Both my dog and cat do it, seemingly to express confusion, curiosity, or an unfulfilled expectation.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]