Relationship Between Social Bias and Visual Attention on Facial Differences

Objectives: To investigate the relationship between visual attention and social bias towards typical faces and visible differences across three dimensions: social competence, intellectual competence, and psychological adjustment.<br/>Methods: A total of 120 participants viewed a randomised series of four facial images featuring male and female faces with typical features and visible differences. Each image was displayed for 5 seconds while participants’ eye movements were recorded using an eye-tracking device. Following each image, participants answered three binary (Yes/No) questions evaluating perceptions of the individual’s social competence, intellectual competence, and psychological adjustment. Response latency to these questions was also measured. Spearman’s correlation () showed differences in the relationship between social bias and visual attention across the two types of facial stimuli.<br/>Results: For typical faces, the findings highlight a consistent weak positive correlation between response latency and participants' answers across all three categories, with positive answers taking shorter response time. For visible differences, response latency exhibited weak correlations with participants' Yes/No answers, with shorter response times often associated with negative answers for social competence and psychological adjustment. The moderate to strong correlation between fixation duration and fixation count ( = .87, p &lt; .001 for typical faces; = .46, p &lt; .001 for visible differences) underscores the cohesiveness of gaze behaviour, indicating that longer fixation times are closely linked to more frequent fixations. However, gaze metrics such as fixation duration and fixation count showed no evidence of association with social bias responses. <br/>Conclusion: While response latency provided some insights into participants’ judgments, one of our findings suggest that social bias showed no evidence of association with visual attention. These findings underscore the complexity of social bias and its limited direct association with gaze behaviour, particularly when comparing typical faces and those with visible differences. Further research is necessary to deepen our understanding of these dynamics.<br/>