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. 2023 Feb 1;23(2):9.
doi: 10.1167/jov.23.2.9.

Do we know our visual preferences?

Nitzan Guy  1   2   3 , Rasha Kardosh  4   5 , Asael Y Sklar  6   7   8 , Oryah C Lancry-Dayan  2   9 , Yoni Pertzov  2   10
Affiliations

Do we know our visual preferences?

Nitzan Guy et al. J Vis. .

Abstract

Humans differ in the amount of time they direct their gaze toward different types of stimuli. Individuals' preferences are known to be reliable and can predict various cognitive and affective processes. However, it remains unclear whether humans are aware of their visual gaze preferences and are able to report it. In this study, across three different tasks and without prior warning, participants were asked to estimate the amount of time they had looked at a certain visual content (e.g., faces or texts) at the end of each experiment. The findings show that people can report accurately their visual gaze preferences. The implications are discussed in the context of visual perception, metacognition, and the development of applied diagnostic tools based on eye tracking.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Stimulus examples. Each line represents an example of a specific image content type. The two images in the attentional bias task were presented simultaneously. The size of the illustrated matrix in Experiment 2 was 2 × 2, while the matrices in the experiment were 10 × 10. Matrix was produced with permissions (copyright Center for Decision Center, University of Chicago). Note: due to copyright limitations, the example of "attractive faces" includes the same face twice, rather than two different faces (copyright Leknes Affective Brain lab). The stimulus example of Experiment 3 (taken by Austin Distel—no permission is needed; faces have been blurred to protect people's identity in accordance with copyright regulations) is an illustration of images in the experiment that were not presented in the figure due to copyright limitations.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Scatterplots with regression lines of gaze preference and subjective reports of visual preference. Each cell illustrates the scatterplot for visual gaze preference (x-axis), as measured by the eye tracker, and subjective reports of visual preference (y-axis), as reported by the participants after the experiment, for each specific content type.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Omnibus analysis forest plot. Each line shows the observed output of visual content. The bottom line indicates the estimate of the random-effects model.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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