Faces prime emotion and gazes direct attention

Our brains are biologically programmed to unintentionally and automatically attend to human faces. Know how it works to tap into that biology.

©Andres Zapata

A study from the Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied, Suboptimal Exposure to Facial Expressions When Viewing Video Messages From a Small Screen: Effects on Emotion, Attention, and Memory, used facial electromyography (EMG) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia as physiological measures of emotion and attention. The researchers found that embedding human faces in designs will help make mobile content more likely to be attended to.

In a world where our attention is under constant assault and is split by visual, auditory, and haptic stimuli, knowing that including human faces in our designs might hold the user’s attention for a little longer is gold. Using human faces in our work turns out to be a simple and powerful design tool.

The Fusiform face ara Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fusiform_Face_Area.png

Fusiform face ara

The Fusiform face ara (FFA) is a blueberry sized part of the brain that’s specifically tasked with quickly processing human faces…