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AI can see you: Machiavellianism and Extraversion are reflected in eye-movements
Tsigeman-Gorenko E., Zemlyak V., Likhanov M., Papageorgiou K., Kovas Y.
Introduction: Recent studies showed an association between personality traits and individual
patterns of visual behaviour in laboratory and other settings. The current study extends previous
research by measuring multiple personality traits in natural settings; and by comparing accuracy of
prediction of multiple machine learning algorithms.
Methods: Adolescent participants (N=35) completed personality questionnaires (Big Five
Inventory and Short Dark Triad Questionnaire) and visited an interactive museum while their eye
movements were recorded with head-mounted eye tracking. To predict personality traits, the eye movement data was analysed using eight machine-learning methods: Random forest, Adaboost,
Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, k Nearest Neighbours, Decision Tree
and a three-layer Perceptron.
Results and Discussion: Extracted eye movement features introduced to machine learning
algorithms predicted personality traits with above 33% chance accuracy (34% - 48%). This result is
comparable to previous ecologically valid studies, but lower than in laboratory-based research. Better
prediction was achieved for Machiavellianism and Extraversion compared to other traits (10 and 9
predictions above the chance level by different algorithms from different parts of the recording).
Conscientiousness, Narcissism and Psychopathy were not reliably predicted from eye movements.
These differences in predictability across traits might be explained by differential activation of
different traits in different situations, such as new vs. familiar, exciting vs. boring, and complex vs.
simple settings. In turn, different machine learning approaches seem to be better at capturing specific
gaze patterns (e.g. saccades), associated with specific traits evoked by the situation. Further research
is needed to gain better insights into trait-situation-algorithm interactions.
Research target:
Psychology
Language:
English