How your eyes predict your personality

Question 1

extrovert

Answer 1

someone who has a very outgoing personality, confident and socially comfortable.

would you say that you are an introvert or an extrovert? What a good question! Well, So, I would have to say that, if anything, I’m the opposite. I’m more of an introvert.

Question 2

introvert

Answer 2

someone who is shy and not comfortable in social situations and doesn’t like being the centre of attention.

maybe I’m pretending to be an extrovert to hide the fact that I’m an introvert. It’s quite a common thing, you know.

it might not be so easy to hide in the future because researchers have developed a computer program that can tell your personality from looking at where you look, by tracking your eye movements. Wow! That sounds pretty hi-tech, and scary.

Question 3

findings

Answer 3

the results and conclusions of research.

The main finding in our study is that it is possible at all to just look at eye movements and then predict something about their personality. And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements in such an unconstrained real world setting.

Question 4

unconstrained

Answer 4

without control or restriction.

And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements in such an unconstrained real world setting.

Unconstrained here means that there wasn’t strict control over the conditions of the experiment. It took place in the ‘real-world’ – so not in a laboratory.

Question 5

gaze

Answer 5

the way that someone looks at someone.

Maybe extrovert people look up a lot because they want to look at people’s faces, whereas some super introvert person maybe just stares at their own shoes, if you want to take the extreme examples. So, probably it somehow changes gaze. But we only know that this information is there and somehow our program figured out how to extract it.

Question 6

figured out

Answer 6

understood something after studying it.
The phrasal verb to figure something out means ‘to understand or realise something’.

We still don’t really know in detail what makes the difference. We can only tell that there are differences and that we know computer programs that can pick up those differences. Maybe extrovert people look up a lot because they want to look at people’s faces, whereas some super introvert person maybe just stares at their own shoes, if you want to take the extreme examples. So, probably it somehow changes gaze. But we only know that this information is there and somehow our program figured out how to extract it.

you know what I’ve just figured out?