Eye fixations when viewing faces

Background. There is disagreement in the literature about the relative importance of the mouth and the teeth to facial attractiveness. Few investigators use objective measures for quantifying which facial features are important and their order of importance. Objective measures of the relative importance of a facial feature are in what order, for how long and how often viewers look at it. The authors conducted a study to determine the hierarchy and length of time study participants spent viewing features in facial images. Methods. The participants were 50 young adults. The authors used a pupillary-corneal reflection technique to measure viewers' eye movements when they were viewing images of faces after orthodontic treatment was completed. The authors took the measurements again after a two-week interval. They quantified eye fixations for six areas of interest: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin and other. The variables measured were the location of the first fixation, the location of the area of maximum fixation duration and the location of the area receiving the maximum number of fixations. Results. Intraobserver variability among the participants was high for most of the variables assessed (kappa < 0.30). For the smile image, first fixation, the most frequent and the longest fixations were other, eye, nose, mouth, ear and chin, in that order. The mouth, even the smiling mouth, received less than 10 percent of the viewers' visual attention. Conclusion. Viewers' visual fixations on images of well-balanced faces do not preferentially go to any single facial feature. The mouth attracts only a small part of visual attention in well-balanced faces.