DailyDirt: The Eyes Have It

from the urls-we-dug-up dept

Are the eyes the windows to the soul? Probably not — but that doesn't mean they aren't darn good indicators of a whole lot of things. Scientists in a variety of fields are still uncovering new secrets within these little wet orbs, often with potentially important medical or psychological implications. Here are some of the latest discoveries made by watching the watchers:

• When humans interact, we unconsciously mirror each others' changing pupil sizes — and this might have to do with trust. A test involving a sharing game and an eye tracker revealed that the mirroring effect correlates with how much people trust each other — but oddly only within the same racial group. [url]
• Eye-rolling is a potent social signal that seems to be unique to humans, and studies confirm that teenage girls are the best at it. Unlike many facial expressions, it's rarely involuntary — but people still do it when there's nobody around to see. [url]
• An infant's developing attention span may be impacted by how much their caregiver's eyes wander while interacting with them. Though, there's a strange attempt by the news release to shoehorn some techno-panic fearmongering into the findings. [url]
• Eye-tracking technology continues to provide deeper insight into autism, with a study focusing on conversations rather than photos and complex scenes. It may turn out that autism therapies stressing eye contact are not the way to go, if patients are in fact averting their eyes to conserve cognitive resources. [url]

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Filed Under: autism, child development, eye contact, eyes, facial expressions, kids, psychology