A new research which is primarily done by the University of South Australia in collaboration with the University of Stuttgart, Finders University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany has claimed in a report that eye movements could give scientists a lot of information about a person’s personality and their well-being. The research team employed various state of the art machine learning algorithms to work to find out how eye movements could tell give more information about a person’s own personality.

Keeping the saying eyes are the windows to the soul in mind, the researchers worked with more than 42 people and observed their eye movements while participants continued to do simple day to day tasks while studying and roaming into the university campus. Participants then also filled out questionnaires which is specially designed by the research team to assess the personality traits of these people.

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The findings of the study indicated that eye movements could tell a lot about a person- if they are sociable or conscientious or even much more curious. The algorithm software which is used by the research team works well and successfully identified four out of the five major, important personality traits, which includes the, neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

According to Dr. Tobias Loetscher, who is the head from the University of South Australia, the study can be used as a reference in the emerging and latest upcoming fields of social signal processing and social robotics by simply connecting, mostly understudied, eye movements and personality traits.

“There’s certainly the potential for these findings to improve the interactions between the human-machine. People are always looking for improved, personalized services. However, in today’s scenario robots and computers are not socially aware, so they cannot adapt to any of the non-verbal cues. This research provides opportunities to develop computers and robots so that they can become more natural, and better at interpreting some of the human social signals”, said Dr. Loetscher.

Loetscher said that the findings of this unique study will also help scientists study and know more about the movements of the natural eye in a real-world scenario and also links it too tightly controlled laboratory studies.

“This research as of now has measured and tracked the visual behavior of people going about their day to day tasks, providing more natural responses than if they were in a laboratory. And thanks to our machine-learning approach, we not only validate the role of personality in explaining eye movement in everyday life, but also we reveal some of the new eye movement characteristics as predictors of the human personality traits”, Dr Loestcher said in a report

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