EYE MOVEMENT BEHAVIOUR VARIES WITH EMOTIONAL CUES

Abstract

A basic question in vision research asks where people look in complex scenes and how this influences their performance in various tasks. Research with static images has confirmed a close link between where people look and what they remember. Here, we examined the pattern of eye movements when participants watching neutral and emotional (happy and sad) clips from Hollywood-style movies. Participants were shown 1-min-long neutral and emotional movie clips. Fixations locations and duration was recorded for total of 10 movies (with 30 clips) over 24 participants, using Tobii T120 eye tracker. Post experiment, clips were segmented into three regions of interest; face, upper body, and other. This was done to access the subject’s viewing behavior in response to different types of stimuli. The fixation locations and duration were analyzed for all the clip types and showed significant differences in observed pattern. In conclusion, the longest fixation mean was for the neutral clips with the smallest fixation for the happy clips and mean fixation for the sad clips lied between before neutral and happy clips. In another conclusion, participants were paying more attention to faces for emotional content in comparison to neutral clips. However, emotional clips showed more fixations in other regions as compared to neutral clips.