Do we look at a threatening person’s face? The relationship between perception and observation of walking strangers
Person perception research predominantly focuses on faces as stimuli, and less attention is paid to full body, moving, stimuli and how our perceptions of that person might affect the way we observe unknown people. Here, we present two studies and register a third. In Study One, 27 raters observed 12 videos of female targets walking towards camera for 10 seconds and rated how ‘threatening’, ‘attractive’ and ‘masculine’ the target individual was. In Study Two, 30 raters observed 22 male and female targets in the same format with the same ratings. The observation of the targets in both studies was recorded on an eyetracker and the percentage of each second spent watching the head, trunk, and legs was recorded. In both studies time spent observing the targets’ head decreased over time. In Study One perception ratings affected time spent observing the head and ratings interacted with change in observation over time. In Study Two no effects were found. Given these inconsistent findings and methodological differences between the studies, here we register a Study Three using two samples of 30 participants and Study Two’s methodology to attempt to support either of the previous studies.