Tracking Eye Fixations Across Varied Political Materials and Determining its Associative Significance with Explicit and Implicit Bias Among Australian Adults

It is generally accepted that socially and politically meaningful material is not only a persuasive mode for marketing ideas and beliefs, but less understood, is how these materials modify or compliment a person’s visual perception. However, despite many studies uncovering the importance and implications of automatic, affective-cognitive processes in understanding the relationship between biases and behaviour, the underlying patterns in cognitive processes specific to visual perception and its co-occurrence with negatively valanced social and political settings, symbols, and bodies, such as those which can be measured against readings of bias, are generally unknown. This study aims to examine the eye fixations of Australian adult participants when presented with varied social and political materials and ascertain the associative significance of their eye movement patterns when compared to measures of explicit and implicit biases. Measuring a person’s eye-movement patterns when exposed to a specific stimulus and calculating the geometric significance of their eye fixations (where and when their gaze stays), offers valuable empirical insight into the stimuli’s influence on the person’s visual perception. The proposed study adopts a case study research design and deploys a novel eye tracking research instrument to measure and describe the eye fixations expressed by a cohort of adults in the Sydney region in response to social and political materials. In conducting this the study, a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the degree of influence that certain subjects and objects have in momentarily configuring an Australian adults’ visual perception is obtained. However, to better situate this dynamic of visual perception, this study compared and contrasted each participant’s eye fixations with measures of explicit and implicit bias. The research team measured each participant’s eye movement patterns and calculated individual trends in eye fixations, determining the associative value of their eye fixations when compared to readings of implicit and explicit bias. This study triangulated the empirical findings from (1) implicit bias association (2) eye-movement patterns specific to eye fixations, and (3) explicit measures of bias, to better understand the associative value of certain social and political biases with visual perception when analysing perceptual-social linkages among Australian adults. Grounded in a novel set of empirical findings, the results of this research will progress existing interdisciplinary research on media effects and advance policy work concerning the safety and control of online social and political media, while offering guidance on how future studies can use eye tracking technology to gain a greater understanding of issues at the intersection of neuroscience and security studies.