Did you know that your eyes can show a lot about your personality?

Contrary to what many think, there are several forms of communication besides verbal. The ability to analyze body signals or looks is natural, but we cannot always do it consciously. For example, a seller who can understand the buyer's real intentions through his behavior is much more likely to make a sale, or to add some items and increase his commission.

As this can be a great advantage, there are several courses and books trying to teach these techniques, which some people seem to master without effort. Determining one's personality quickly is more complicated, but even so, there are those who venture. Zodiac sign, handwriting analysis or favorite fruit - there are no limits to these associations.

The methods vary, but considering a scientific approach, there are five main characteristics that can be examined in an individual. They are: emotional instability, extroversion, empathy, openness to experience and responsibility.

Artificial intelligence in feature analysis

Through a computer system that analyzes eye movement, scientist Tobias Loetscher of the University of South Australia examined four of these characteristics (the exception being openness to experiments). In addition, they got an additional that they called "curiosity of perception, " that is, the tendency to question sensory stimuli.

This human aspect has been tested in a number of studies, which have shown that we have actually demonstrated a great deal through it. We can see this in practice; For example, when you come across a person who has a deep and fixed gaze, you already imagine that he is at least a little neurotic. One of these studies, earlier, showed that optimists spend less time looking at disgusting medical images than pessimists, and another found that those with a high degree of acceptance of the new are more entertained with scenarios in abstract animations.

In Tobias's research, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, he and his team sought to associate invidualities with eye movements, as opposed to previous research, which only postulated certain specificities and specific movements. This is innovative in the interaction between us and the robots, because with the prior knowledge of our personality, the machine could tailor the treatment to make the experience more enjoyable and natural.

Participant Analysis

For the study, 42 students were selected, who completed a questionnaire about their personality details, based on the five main characteristics. After that, they were given glasses with various sensors, which recorded eye movement, direction, pupil dilation and also small movements in social interactions. Dressed with the device, they were taken to a setting where they needed to interact and simulate daily activities, as directed by the researchers.

The data obtained were transferred to a machine learning algorithm, which was able to associate some particularities with behaviors. In general, those who blinked the most said they had more problems of emotional instability; responsibility seemed to be linked to the speed with which participants moved their eyes while maintaining eye contact with someone. Empathy was related to how much the person directed his gaze to the lower right side of his field of vision, while extroversion was identified by the size of the pupil and the number of small deviations when facing another.

As much as these patterns have been pointed out, artificial predictions are still quite shallow. Tobias says this is a small study, and solutions using the equipment need a large amount of data to work satisfactorily. He and his team expect results to be further improved. The whole process must be handled very carefully, because if analyzing some people's Facebook information caused so many problems, imagine a database that has the main personality characteristics of the population of an entire country. At the very least scary.