Eye Perception Difference Between the Conservative and the Liberal : Verification of Personal Tendency using Eye-tracking Machine

Abstract

Measuring and evaluation of audience's visual message perception are crucial process for scientific production of visual content. This study tried to evaluate the difference of viewer's awareness of visual object depends on his or her inherent characteristics like conservatism using an eye tracker system. Especially, this experiment tested research questions about positive correlation between conservatism and peoples' eye movements following the sound visual messages. 57 subjects participated in the test. Two different groups were exposed to two visual elements representing 'the conservative' and 'the liberal'. The results showed that people tended to have different way of seeing visual objects according to their inherent characteristics. Also by comparing the gaze time at the object and area of interest(AOI) in visual, this study is able to verify the existence of 'positive way of seeing' and 'negative way of seeing'. The two different ways of seeing have their own trail of eye movement.

1. INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare called the eye the window of the mind, or the window of the soul. And the Roman philosopher Cicero called the eye a translator of the mind[1]. The Bible describes the eyes as the lamps of the body. The original text of Matthew is as follows; The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness [2]. But what exactly do we see? In fact, the eye provides a lot of information about a person's feelings or mind. When people are sad or worried, they narrow their eyebrows and make their eyes look smaller. And when people are happy, they often say, "You look bright" or "Your eyes look sparkling, " which is why they look big and bright because people raise their eyes up when they are happy.

In psychology, one may notice whether one is really happy or falsely happy by looking through one's eyes at the smiling mouth. This is because when you are really happy, not only your mouth but also your brow feet appear on the corners of your eyes [3].

Human must face a task to draw pertinent meanings from visual stimuli. This interaction between eye perception and human cognition are kind of psychological experience operating through visual center of the viewers. The activity of visual perception involves physical eye movements, the sensing organ, and the analysis carried out by the brain [4]. If we use eye movement tracking tools, we can find measurable data such as direction of attention, jumps in eye movement, and stops to focus [5].

Scientists present evidence that conservative and progressive brain have different information processing. This cause of difference has not been revealed yet perfectly, but the political gene may be associated with. Academic evidences from political science, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics are starting to reveal the causes of difference between the conservative and liberal.

The primary focus of this research is to consider the psychology or characteristics of the conservative and liberal relates to visual stimulus. By operationally suggest visual stimulus with the same visual conditions, we tested viewers to watch the visual objects in different situations and interpreted the subject’s eyes response to visual media.

2. RELATED WORKS

2.1 Relation of Pupils and Emotion

If the eye is the window of the soul, the pupil is the entrance into the eye. Pupils work like lenses on a camera. It grows, contracts, and controls the amount of light that enters the eye. This adjustment is referred to as a "pupillary light response" [6]. We know in common sense that brightness makes the pupils smaller and darkness makes the pupils bigger. The automatic change in pupil size in bright light is a type of autonomic nervous system reaction. The autonomic nervous system's response cannot lie even if it can lie according to the brain's instructions. Just like sweating when it's hot and getting goose bumps when it's cold. Our bodies allow the autonomic nervous system to prepare for responses to external stimuli.

Psychologists describe the size of the pupils as exploration and exploitation mode. When exploring the surroundings, i.e., looking for threats and opportunities, this can be called heightened arousal. In these exploratory states, visual sensitivity is of paramount importance, and the pupil opens as wide as possible to obtain as much information as possible.

Once the vision is fixed on the target of interest, it will be converted to the application mode. In other words, we try to find and understand every possible way to utilize the object by looking closely at it. The pupils dilate or contract so that the appropriate level of light is received. The so-called “pupillary light response” is not just a mechanical reaction to a stimulus, but rather a adjustment that corresponds to human expectations and emotions, like the lens of a camera. Therefore, the eyes can be the window of the soul, but the pupils can tell a lot about what is happening in a person's mind.

Studies show that different measures can track six human emotions, such as joy, anger, fear, and surprise. How wide you open your eyes, the distance between your eyes and eyebrows, wrinkles around your nose, and movements just below your eyes can detect human emotions. Experiments on 600 facial photographs show that participants can easily infer basic emotions from different images of their eyes. So the pupil dilation can be a sign to deceive something. At this time, pupil dilation may be a sign to deceive something. The autonomic nervous system determines the size of the pupils, and dilation of the pupils is usually an indicator of increased cognitive demand [7]. Liars usually experience an increase in cognitive demand. Sphincter and dilated muscles usually control the size of the pupil, which the autonomic nervous system controls. Sympathetic activity, a part of the autonomic nervous system, increases in stress situations, and this increase in sympathetic activity leads to dilation of the pupil, thus dilation of the pupil can signal a lie [8].

2.2 Social scientific approaches to differences in the Liberal and the Conservative behaviour, and psychological processes

In general, the liberals, or progress, are more open to experience, tend to seek change and novelty and prefer things that are familiar, stable, and predictable. In addition, remuneration relates to the need to reduce uncertainty and threats, such as system instability, low tolerance for ambiguity, desire for order, and fear of threats. Studies have been reported that the liberalism and conservatism are related to certain temperamental tendencies inherent within humans, regardless of the conditions of the times or historical specificities [9].

The liberal is also defined as a position to pursue the development of society in a more fundamental and innovative way, while conservatism is a position to slowly change society through gradual reform instead of radical revolution or mode of transformation [10]. However, it is noteworthy that conservatives never deny or reject change [11], which has a common denominator in which the progress and conservative are mutually at odds.

Political scientists are looking for the origins of this conservative and progressive political orientation in the Whig and Tory parties, the origins of the British political parties. In the U.S., the third president, Thomas Jefferson, has been at odds between conservative and progressive for hundreds of years since he used the terms conservative hawks and moderate pigeons in 1798. In the U.S., a bestseller called "Republican Brain" found that psychological and cognitive factors of conservative and progress are different [12].

However, discourse on conservative and liberalism is as much philosophical and political as North Korea calls its society democracy, and it is not easy to agree with scientifically. In particular, the subject of a person's mind, including conservative or progress, was mainly dealt with in psychology until the mid-20th century, and the subject was so complex and subtle that it was not something to be dealt with in strict science. Since the mid-20th century, however, the subject of mind has entered the realm of scientific research, with computer, cybernetics, information theory, brain science, and evolutionary biology raising new issues.

3. RESEARCH QUESTION AND METHOD

3.1 Research Question

This study tried to evaluate the difference of people's awareness of visual object depends on his or her inherent characteristics like conservatism using an eye tracker system. Especially, this experiment tested research questions about positive correlation between conservatism and people’s eye movements. This research used two different groups like conservative and progressive. They were exposed to two different stimulus representing 'the conservative' and 'the progressive'.

Table 1. Testing Groups and Visual Stimuli.

This research investigated the relationship between viewers’ conservatism and viewer's eye movement. This experiment used two different visual variables, photo of conservative Korean political leader (Keunhye Park) and photo of liberal political leader (Jaein Moon). The term' photo of conservative Korean political leader ' connotes that the shot a subject watches has conservative stimuli in it. The term ' photo of liberal political leader ' connotes that the shot a subject watches has progressive stimuli in it. The objects this study are to verify the relation with viewer’s eye movement following inherent conservatism. The specific research question is as follows: Are there any positive correlation between conservatism and viewers eye movements toward political stimulus?

3.2 Participants and Experiment Materials

57 students were recruited from Kyungsung University in Busan, Korea. They are aged 20 to 29, 30 male and 27 female. Participants visited the Eye-tracking Lab at Kyungsung University. A pre-questionnaire was conducted before the experiment. This research used two different photo slides that contained political leaders representing the conservative and the liberal party. Two photos of politician Keunhye Park, former president of Korea and Jaein Moon, current president were used for experiment.

All participants were forced to choose their political tendency with ten filtering questions for grouping. The filtering questions are attitude toward 1) Withdrawal of US Army in Korea 2) Abolition of National Security Law of Korea 3) Demolition of FTA Agreement between Korea and USA 4) Abolition of NLL 5) Homosexual 6) Abortion 7) Sex before Marry 8) International Marry 9) Plastic Surgery for Job Seeking 10) Collaboration Government between South Korea and North Korea. One group with conservative tendency (Pro Keunhye Park group) and another group with progressive tendency (Pro Jaein Moon group) were derived. Those two files had the same visual elements and time lines.

3.3 Procedures

Two politician’s visual samples were exposed to 57 subjects each. Tobii eye movement tracking machine is used for observing the viewers' eye movements. Eye movement tracking machine can detect various biofeedback of eye including eye fixation, saccade, and pupil size [13]. Two visual stimuli were shown to each participant. Each scene was presented for 10 seconds. Finally, the gathered eye tracking data and results were analyzed with SPSS statistic software. The experimental data was analyzed by the paired-sample T-test. An in-depth interview and survey questions followed for follow-up analysis.

A short questionnaire to ask participants’ demographic information and media habits was provided before the experiment. Stimuli were displayed via a 17 inch LCD computer screen. While the participants were watching news on the screen where eye tracking cameras were implemented and hidden, the movement of their pupils was captured and the gaze flow was observed in real time through another computer monitor that was invisible to a participant. By tracking their pupils, where and how long they were gazing at was explored. After watching all news, a recall test was given to measure how well participants could retrieve the news and an interview was followed to supplement the questionnaire.

4. RESULTS

As seen from Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, when the participants have positive feeling toward their political candidate, they showed similar gazing pattern in heat-map analysis. The heat-map represents that how long participant see visual object during restricted time. Red means longer time and green means shorter time. Users showed tendency of watching eyes when they encounter prefer photo of candidates. Then they move their eye route into mouth.

Fig. 1. Pro Keunhye Park Group.

Fig. 2. Pro Jaein Moon Group.

But as seen from Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, when the participants have negative feeling toward their political candidate, they showed different gazing pattern in heat-map analysis. Conservative group showed that similar pattern of watching candidate when they encounter prefer photo of candidate and dislike candidate. But liberal group showed extremely different watching pattern between prefer candidate and dislike candidate. The liberal group participants have a tendency of watching philtrum area rather than eye or mouth area when they exposed to dislike candidate.

Fig. 3. Anti Keunhye Park Group.

Fig. 4. Anti Jaein Moon Group.

As the ANOVA table (Table 2) shows, the overall gaze time of the face of Jaein Moon and Keunhye Park has no statistical difference (4.41448 second versus 4.67087). In the case of the stimuli of Keunhye Park (Table 3), we found the statistic significant difference that conservative group’s eye stayed longer at the face (F=3.965, p=0.05).

Table 2. ANOVA Test: Face of Jaein Moon (gaze time: s).

Table 3. ANOVA Test: Face of Keunhye Park (gaze time: s).

As found at the heat-map analysis, the philtrum area has big gap between two groups. Statistic results also support this phenomenon. ANOVA table (Table 4) shows, the average gaze time of the philtrum area between conservative and liberal group about Jaein Moon has no statistical difference (0.99364 second versus 1.06941). But in the case of the stimuli of Keunhye Park (Table 5), we found the statistic significant difference that liberal group’s eye stayed longer at the face (F=5.298, p=0.026).

Table 4. ANOVA Test: Philtrum area of Jaein Moon (gaze time: s).

Table 5. ANOVA Test: Philtrum are of Keunhye Park (gaze time: s).

5. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION

Confrontation between the conservative and the progressive produced many social problems such as political conflict, generation gap, divide between the rich and the poor over the world. Especially these are getting worse in Korea as we saw during past political elections. Scientific explanation can solve these polarizations. This study tried to reveal how the conservative and the progressive see, response, and think differently through experimentation.

This experiment showed that the two different groups have similar gazing pattern when they have positive feeling toward their political candidate. For example they both start to gaze candidate’s eyes then they move their eye trace toward nose and mouth. But these two groups showed different gazing pattern when the participants have negative feeling toward their political candidates. Conservative group has almost same pattern of watching candidate when they encounter prefer candidate and dislike candidate. But liberal group has totally different viewing trace between prefer candidate and dislike candidate. The liberal group participants have a tendency of watching philtrum area rather than eye or mouth area when they exposed to dislike candidate.

Mooney(2012) suggested that republican and democrat in US have different psychological and cognitive elements. As we see in the Korean case, the liberal group has a psychology of hostile perception. In Korean presidential election period during 2013 and 2018, the liberal party showed very rough expression and behavior in campaign. Our results also reflect those social phenomena. This research has practical implications to the visual strategies about political campaign. Also this research can provide scientific methodology for verifying that how we set up the visual objects, how we allocate the direction of objects, and how we organize visual screen.