It is widely accepted that social information processing involves embodiment, i.e., that thoughts comprise mental simulations of bodily experiences and, at the same time, cognition directly affects the content of sensory-motor systems. In this work we investigate whether it is possible to observe a top-down effect of implicit association on the eye gaze behavior by means of eye-tracking methods and techniques. We assume that if attitudes, social perception, and emotion are the outcome of embodied processes, then people with different kinds of mental attributes (e.g. racial prejudices) must perform different kinds of eye gaze movements when they explore visual content of implicit association tasks. The relationship between the eye movements – recorded by the open-source ITU Gaze Tracker eye-tracking system – and implicit associations occurring during an Implicit Association Test (IAT) on hidden ethnic biases of 80 Caucasian participants was investigated in two experiments with the same experimental paradigm. Both total times of fixations and total number of fixations emerged together as significant predictors of IAT scores. The analysis carried out on number of fixations showed that subjects implicitly watch what they believe, i.e. the association according to their psychological attributes. Eye-tracking methodology seems hence to be a promising approach to obtain objective measures to investigate the unintended characteristics underlying behaviour in ecological settings and could be applicable to different research contexts such as studies on stereotypes, implicit attitudes, self-esteem, and self-concept.
Believing is Seeing: Ocular-Sensory-Motor Embodiment of Implicit Associations
FEDERICI, Stefano
2013
Abstract
It is widely accepted that social information processing involves embodiment, i.e., that thoughts comprise mental simulations of bodily experiences and, at the same time, cognition directly affects the content of sensory-motor systems. In this work we investigate whether it is possible to observe a top-down effect of implicit association on the eye gaze behavior by means of eye-tracking methods and techniques. We assume that if attitudes, social perception, and emotion are the outcome of embodied processes, then people with different kinds of mental attributes (e.g. racial prejudices) must perform different kinds of eye gaze movements when they explore visual content of implicit association tasks. The relationship between the eye movements – recorded by the open-source ITU Gaze Tracker eye-tracking system – and implicit associations occurring during an Implicit Association Test (IAT) on hidden ethnic biases of 80 Caucasian participants was investigated in two experiments with the same experimental paradigm. Both total times of fixations and total number of fixations emerged together as significant predictors of IAT scores. The analysis carried out on number of fixations showed that subjects implicitly watch what they believe, i.e. the association according to their psychological attributes. Eye-tracking methodology seems hence to be a promising approach to obtain objective measures to investigate the unintended characteristics underlying behaviour in ecological settings and could be applicable to different research contexts such as studies on stereotypes, implicit attitudes, self-esteem, and self-concept.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
