"Looking at What One Believies". Indagine sulla Relazione tra Movimenti Oculari e Associazioni Implicite

Social information processing involves embodiment, i.e. thoughts comprise mental simulations of bodily experiences, and, at the same time, cognition directly affects the content of sensory-motor systems. We investigate whether it is possible to observe a top-down effect of implicit association on eye gaze behaviour by means of eye-tracking methods and techniques. We assume that if attitudes, social perception, and emotion are the outcome of embodied processes, then people with different kinds of mental attributes (e.g. racial prejudices) must perform different kinds of eye gaze movements when they explore the visual content of implicit association tasks. The relationship between the eye movements –recorded by the open-source ITU Gaze Tracker eye tracking system– and implicit associations occurring during an Implicit Association Test (IAT) on hidden ethnic biases of about 80 Caucasian participants was investigated in two experiments with the same experimental paradigm. Both total times of fixations and total number of fixations emerged as significant predictors of IAT scores. The analysis carried out on the number of fixations showed that subjects implicitly watch what they believe, i.e. the association according to their psychological attributes. Eye-tracking methodology hence seems to be a promising approach to obtain objective measures to investigate the unintended characteristics underlying behaviour in ecological settings and could be applicable to different research contexts such as studies on stereotypes, implicit attitudes, self-esteem, and self-concept.