Looking at What One Believes: Investigation of the Relationship between Eye Movements and Implicit Associations

Introduction and Aim: The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a paradigm based on categorization tasks measuring outcomes causally produced by psychological differences in the strength of association between two concepts and a bipolar attribute. Our work aims to investigate the relationship between ocular responses and implicit associations, and in particular, whether eye behaviour can be considered predictive of implicit measures. Method: The eye movements occurring during an IAT on hidden ethnic biases of 30 Caucasian participants were recorded by the open-source ITU Gaze Tracker eye-tracking system and then compared to the IAT indices. Results: Both total times of fixations and total number of fixations emerged together as significant predictors of IAT scores (average response time for each trial = 961,8 ms; average time of fixation on each area of interest = 24,8 ms). The analysis carried out on number of fixations showed that subjects seem to implicitly search for the association according to their psychological attributes. Conclusion: Eye-tracking methodology seems to be a promising approach to analyse the implicit components involved in visual exploration and could be adaptable to different research contexts, such as the investigation of the implicit processes involved in human–technology interaction and the analysis of user experience.