Eye Tracking: Avatar Lie Detection … It’s All in the Eyes
Anyone who has been told a lie knows that it doesn’t feel great to be misled. Of course, some people are more gullible than others while some seem to have a knack for spotting a lie right from the get go.
When it comes to the World Wide Web, we know bynow that it pretty much comes with the territory that we’re being lied to on a daily basis. Phishing scams, Nigerian princes asking for money, random friendship and sexual solicitations, advertisements – the list of Internet deception goes on. One study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that people tend to lie 50% more via email than they do in handwritten letters. It’s been well documented that people have an easier time lying when they don’t have to do it in person, and common knowledge will tell you to watch a person’s eyes to see when they’re fibbing.
And what about lying avatars? Researchers are also studying deception in online virtual worlds, such as Second Life. These worlds are often populated by people using avatars with static and pre-programmed gazes. One way to make these figures more realistic is to animate their eye movements, reproducing a person’s eye movement on their avatar. But scientists are finding that, as you can imagine, even an avatar’s eyes can give away if someone is telling the truth.
Researchers at University College London asked 11 volunteers a series of personal questions and asked them to lie in some of their answers. The participants wore eye tracking glasses that recorded and measured blink rate, direction and length of gaze, and pupil dilation. Another group of 27 people then watched a video clips featuring avatars depicting a selection of the original 11 participants.
Some avatars’ eye movements mirrored those of the volunteers while others had no eye movement at all, and volunteers were asked if they thought the avatars were telling the truth. On average, the volunteers managed to spot 88% of truths correctly when the avatars had eye movement, but only 70% without. They had more trouble spotting the lies, but eye movement certainly aided them in their perception – 48% accuracy with eye movement compared to 39% without.
The results of the study will be presented at the 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems next week in Atlanta, Georgia.
It’s an interesting read and goes to show how important the eyes are in communication, both negative and positive.