Computers are becoming more and more capable of interpreting human behavior, and they can now do so by observing how people use their eyes.
Using artificial intelligence to analyze a person's eye movements, a software system developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics can draw conclusions about a person's personality traits.
Additionally, people frequently subconsciously evaluate a person's character based on their behavior. The new software system is now able to process a person's eye movements to calculate, for example, how neurotic, extrovert, and curious they are in order to make human-computer collaboration more social, effective, and adaptable.
Eye movements are a window into our minds as well as a means of observing our surroundings. Andreas Bulling, who is in charge of the Perceptual User Interfaces research group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the Cluster of Excellence at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, says, "They reveal who we are, how we feel, and what we do". Without even realizing it, people are naturally able to read social cues from their eyes.
In order to teach computers this skill, Andreas Bulling is currently working with scientists in Australia and Stuttgart. This indicates, for instance, that robots will eventually be able to utilize and comprehend human nonverbal communication channels. The group has fostered an AI based programming framework for this reason. The product assesses eye developments recorded by an eye tracker to foresee the subject's character attributes
Personality traits used by psychologists
The researchers trained their software with artificial intelligence to predict four personality traits that psychologists use to describe people. After that, the software was able to figure out how neurotic, agreeable, outgoing, conscientious, and curious the test subjects were.
Although the system is certain to become more reliable in the future, Andreas Bulling states that the predictions are not yet accurate enough for practical applications. His optimism stems in part from the fact that, in the future, the eye tracker's already-integrated camera, which can show what the wearer is seeing, can also be used to train the system.
Fifty students from Flinders University in Australia, with an average age of 22 years, provided the training and evaluation data. The eye tracker recorded the test subjects' eye movements as they walked around campus for approximately ten minutes and bought coffee or other items from the campus shop. It paid particular attention to where they fixed their gaze and how frequently they blinked. After that, the researchers asked the students to complete a set of personality test questionnaires that have been used by psychologists for a long time
Nonverbal behavior makes robots more human
The knowledge we gained from this study about nonverbal behavior could, for instance, be applied to robots to make their behavior more human. According to Bulling, such systems would then be able to communicate with humans in a manner that is significantly more natural, making them more adaptable and effective. But the software could also help people with autism and other disorders that make it hard for them to communicate verbally because it could help them understand other people's visual behavior and control their own eye movements, like not looking at other people.
Andreas Bulling is aware that the software also makes it possible to conduct computer-supported personality tests, which could be misused by corporations and autocratic governments that already use digital analysis of human behavior. Andreas Bulling, on the other hand, emphasizes that this technology is far from adequate for reliably and without human assistance identifying personality traits because it currently requires the subject to wear the eye tracker directly in front of their eye.
In addition, the technology, like the majority of other inventions, could be used to both benefit and harm humanity, even if it were to become possible to evaluate human personality traits with less effort in the future. We are researchers, we can make the innovation accessible and show what's potential, says the PC researcher. The use of the technology must be governed by society and the law
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