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Eye tracking helps researchers investigate how people attend to and process social information, from faces and emotional expressions to gaze cues and complex social scenes. Explore the visual attention patterns involved in understanding others' emotions, intentions, beliefs, and behavior.
Why eye trackingTwo people can see the same face or social scene and explore it very differently. They may focus on different features, look in a different sequence, or spend more time on particular people or cues.
Eye tracking reveals where and when people direct their visual attention as they process social information. Combined with behavioral and experimental measures, gaze data can help researchers investigate social perception, perspective-taking, and the cognitive processes involved in understanding others.
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research applicationsInvestigate how people visually explore faces, expressions, social groups, and other information as they form impressions and judgments.
First impressions
Explore which visual information people attend to when encountering and evaluating someone for the first time.
Face perception
Investigate how people visually explore different regions of the face and how viewing patterns change across stimuli or conditions.
Facial expressions
Study visual behavior as people encounter emotional expressions and other socially relevant facial cues.
Stereotypes
Investigate whether patterns of visual attention differ across social categories, contexts, or experimental conditions.
Prejudice and bias
Examine patterns of visual attention and avoidance alongside established behavioral and attitudinal measures.
Person perception
Study how people gather visual information about others and how gaze relates to subsequent impressions or judgments.
ConfigurationsChoose a setup based on how much control your study requires, from precisely presented social stimuli to visual behavior in natural environments.
Present faces, expressions, photographs, videos, and social scenes under highly controlled conditions while precisely measuring visual attention.
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Run controlled studies across different research environments with a compact setup for presenting faces, social scenes, videos, and other visual stimuli.
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Capture gaze from the participant's perspective to investigate how people visually explore others and socially relevant information in natural environments.
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Define areas of interest and analyze measures such as time to first fixation, fixation duration, dwell time, and visit patterns to investigate how social information is visually explored.
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Studies show that people with social anxiety pay more attention to negative facial expressions. An eye tracking study confirmed this theory and revealed that training people to focus on positive stimuli can lead to a reduction in this bias.
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Researchers from University of Chicago used eye tracking to evaluate social attention in two different cultural populations, urban North American participants, and rural Yucatec Mayan participants.
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Watch the webinar to learn how researchers used eye tracking to uncover valuable insights in psychological and cognitive sciences.
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Researchers from Freie Universität Berlin used eye tracking in a study that revealed the incidence of negativity biases among different cultures by testing reactions to facial expressions.
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In this article, we delve deeper into the speed of visual perception, how it is measured and provide a list of factors that can influence perceptual processes.
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In this presentation, Dr. Jörg Mühlhans, shares his study that has investigated the influence of music on gaze behavior, as well as the visual information on musical perception by means of various manipulations.
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Use eye tracking to study social interaction, including eye contact, mutual gaze, communication, cooperation, and group behavior in controlled and natural settings.
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Use eye tracking to study social influence, including conformity, social cues, group behavior, decision-making, and responses to social pressure.
Talk to our team about your research question, study design, and requirements.
We can help you find an eye tracking approach that fits the way you want to study social cognition and behavior.
Quick answersFind answers to common questions about using eye tracking to study faces, first impressions, social attention, and how people visually perceive others.
Resources & communityFree training, open-source tools, and direct support, designed to get you from unboxing to publishable results as fast as possible.
Tobii Academy
Free online learning platform with structured courses covering every stage of eye tracking research, from fundamental concepts to advanced analysis techniques.
→ Eye tracking fundamentals and methodology
→ Experiment design best practices
→ Tobii Pro Lab software training
→ Data analysis and interpretation
→ Certification tracks
Open-source research tools
50+ community-curated tools, experiment scripts, and integration libraries across the full eye tracking workflow. PsychoPy, MATLAB, Python, LSL, and more.
Tobii Connect support portal
Knowledge base, firmware updates, troubleshooting guides, and direct support from Tobii's technical team. Your first stop for any hardware or software question.
→ Product setup and troubleshooting guides
→ Firmware and software downloads
→ Data quality methodology documentation
→ Direct ticket support for registered products
→ Sample projects and demo recordings