Reading the Mind in the Nose

Humans infer mental states and traits from faces and their expressions. Previous research focused on the role of eyes and mouths in this process, even though most observers fixate somewhere in between. Here, we report that ratings of the nose region are surprisingly consistent with those for the full face and even with subjective feelings of the nose bearer. We propose the nose as central to faces and their perception

Reading the mind in the nose

Humans infer mental states and traits from faces and their expressions. Previous research focused on the role of eyes and mouths in this process, even though most observers fixate somewhere in between. Here, we report that ratings of the nose region are surprisingly consistent with those for the full face and even with subjective feelings of the nose bearer. We propose the nose as central to faces and their perception

Individual differences in looking at persons in scenes

Individuals freely viewing complex scenes vary in their fixation behavior. The most prominent and reliable dimension of such individual differences is the tendency to fixate faces. However, much less is known about how observers distribute fixations across other body parts of persons in scenes and how individuals may vary in this regard. Here, we aimed to close this gap. We expanded a popular annotated stimulus set (Xu et al., 2014) with 6365 hand-delineated pixel masks for body parts of 1136 persons embedded in 700 complex scenes, which we publish with this paper (https://osf.io/ynujz/). This resource allowed us to analyze the person-directed fixations of 103 participants freely viewing these scenes. We found large and reliable individual differences in the distribution of fixations across person features. Individual fixation tendencies formed two anti-correlated clusters, one for eyes, head and the inner face and one for body features (torsi, arms, legs and hands). Interestingly, the tendency to fixate mouths was independent of the face cluster. Finally, our results show that observers who tend to avoid person fixations in general, particularly do so for the face region. These findings underscore the role of individual differences in fixation behavior and reveal underlying dimensions. They are further in line with a recently proposed push-pull relationship between cortical tuning for faces and bodies. They may also aid the comparison of special populations to general variation

sj-docx-1-ipe-10.1177_20416695231163449 - Supplemental material for Reading the mind in the nose

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ipe-10.1177_20416695231163449 for Reading the mind in the nose by Maximilian Davide Broda and Benjamin de Haas in i-Perception</p

Accepted manuscript

Manuscript accepted for publication in Journal of Visio