When you step into a new place, what do your eyes focus on first? Is it the architectural features of a room? Are you drawn to greenery and nature? Are you noticing the writing tools scattered across desks?
The order in which your eyes focus on things in new spaces is incredibly unique – so unique, it’s like an “attentional fingerprint,” according to a new study from Dartmouth College.
“Of course, at the end of being in a room together, you and I would have — on average — looked at many of the same things in that environment,” said Caroline Robertson, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and senior researcher on the study.
But in the first few milliseconds of looking around, people observe different things, and that can reveal information about them, she explained.
To study people’s gazes, Robertson’s team had people wear virtual reality headsets with eye tracking devices and analyzed which objects people looked at first in hundreds of new environments.
She found that people’s scan patterns are individualized. For example, someone who identifies as patriotic would be more likely to notice their country’s flag hanging in the corner of a room compared to someone who is not particularly interested in patriotism.
“We do have very reliable and stable differences in how we scan the world,” Robertson said. “And to a large extent, those differences have to do with our own internal priorities and memories.”
Robertson thinks there is both a philosophical and psychological implication as well as a technology security and data privacy implication from her work.
Psychologically, it’s often assumed that two people who enter the same environment largely process the same visual world, but they may interpret or remember things differently.
Robertson’s findings suggest that the personality and mindset a person brings into a new environment actually shapes how they see it.
“What we bring to bear on our visual environment shapes even how we initially encode it.”
This research has practical data privacy implications as well.
“Eye tracking reveals much more than people realize about who they are,” Robertson said.
If our gazes are unique and often signal different personalities, politics, or interests, then technology that incorporates eye-tracking could use that information to identify individuals and their attention-capturing interests.
“Gaze data should really be treated as sensitive behavioral data in technology,” Robertson said. “Especially as eye tracking gets built in more and more to VR headsets and AR glasses and cars, consumer devices. People should understand the degree to which their gaze patterns are really part of important biometric data.”
The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
