CASE STUDY: The Way we Look at an Image or a Webpage Can Reveal Personality Traits
Can the way you look at a scene reveal who you are? Introducing the concept of a Gaze-based Signature of Personality (GSP), a study published in Scientific Reports by Thomas Le Bras, Benoit Allibe, and Karine Doré-Mazars reveals that distinct personality traits leave stable oculomotor marks across different visual contexts.
Trait Tracking with EyeLink and WebLink
The study tested 91 participants across various visual exploration tasks to see if eye movement patterns consistently correlated with the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism).
- Initial Assessments: Participants completed demographic forms, initial emotional state evaluations, and the French Big Five Inventory (BFI-Fr) questionnaire.
- Visual Exploration Tasks: Participants viewed 24 static images and 24 interactive web pages for 15 seconds each.
- Task Manipulations: Each stimulus was presented under two distinct instructions: a free-viewing task (explore naturally) and a target-finding task (search for embedded target icons).
- Dynamic Data Analysis: To capture how gaze evolves over time, researchers analyzed the first 10 seconds of each trial by chunking eye-movement data into 1-second windows.
To capture eye movements across both static images and live web environments, the researchers recorded right-eye gaze using an EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker (SR Research) operating at a 1000 Hz sampling rate with 0.05° spatial precision.
The experiment was run using SR Research WebLink integrated with Mozilla Firefox. WebLink enabled seamless display control and precise synchronization between real-time eye tracking and active user interactions—such as scrolling or mouse movement—on dynamic web pages.
The Takeaway—Strong Visual Processing Signatures
The EyeLink gaze data showed that three of the five big five personality traits showed strong visual processing signatures:
- Conscientiousness: Highly conscientious individuals showed deeper visual processing (longer fixation durations) and broader attentional focus (larger saccade amplitudes) to achieve task goals.
- Agreeableness: Agreeable people are characterized by faster, less deep visual processing (consistently shorter fixation durations) and frequent switching between broad scanning and detailed focal processing.
- Neuroticism: People scoring highly on neuroticism showed a context-robust signature of larger saccade amplitudes (wider spatial deployment of attention) across all contexts, alongside longer fixations during goal-directed search.
Powered by high-speed EyeLink tracking and WebLink software, this research demonstrates that a Gaze-based Signature of Personality can be captured from just a few seconds of eye movements, opening new doors for implicit cognitive assessment and clinical diagnostics.
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