Naturalistic face-directed attention predicts face recognition ability
- 1UNSW Sydney
Abstract
Recognising people precedes and informs most social interactions, yet it is not clear why individuals differ so markedly in face recognition ability. Exposure-based accounts propose that it is shaped by visual experience with faces, known as 'face diet', but most prior work treats exposure as passively acquired, thereby masking the active and dynamic nature of visual attention in natural settings. Here we examined whether spontaneous attention to faces in everyday environments predicts face recognition ability. Eighty participants wore mobile eye-tracking glasses while walking through a busy university campus and during a face-to-face interaction, before completing standard measures of face recognition ability. Fixations directed to faces showed stable individual differences in both settings. People who looked more at faces scored higher on our composite measure of face recognition ability, and gaze in the two settings predicted ability independently, together accounting for 22% of its variance. These findings suggest that differences in how people actively sample visual information from their environments may be an overlooked source of variance in perceptual expertise.
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BibTeX
@misc{white2026naturalistic,
title = {{Naturalistic face-directed attention predicts face recognition ability}},
author = {D. White and V. P. L. Varela and M. Piggott and J. D. Dunn and S. Miellet and A. Towler and B. Popovic},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.30.755511},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.30.755511v1},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Naturalistic face-directed attention predicts face recognition ability
AU - D. White
AU - V. P. L. Varela
AU - M. Piggott
AU - J. D. Dunn
AU - S. Miellet
AU - A. Towler
AU - B. Popovic
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.30.755511
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.30.755511v1
AB - Recognising people precedes and informs most social interactions, yet it is not clear why individuals differ so markedly in face recognition ability. Exposure-based accounts propose that it is shaped by visual experience with faces, known as 'face diet', but most prior work treats exposure as passively acquired, thereby masking the active and dynamic nature of visual attention in natural settings. Here we examined whether spontaneous attention to faces in everyday environments predicts face recognition ability. Eighty participants wore mobile eye-tracking glasses while walking through a busy university campus and during a face-to-face interaction, before completing standard measures of face recognition ability. Fixations directed to faces showed stable individual differences in both settings. People who looked more at faces scored higher on our composite measure of face recognition ability, and gaze in the two settings predicted ability independently, together accounting for 22% of its variance. These findings suggest that differences in how people actively sample visual information from their environments may be an overlooked source of variance in perceptual expertise.
ER -