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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.
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.
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. The FFA is responsible for automatically processing human faces, and it’s going to do it whether we try to direct our attention to a face or not.
This is one of many “bottom-up” attentional processing systems that quickly, effortlessly, and automatically directs our attention in our environment. Knowing and understanding how we are wired can help us create better received and more successful designs.
The study further suggests that happy faces, in particular, boost recall, likability, and credibility of the content consumed on mobile devices — and presumably, also on larger screens. And all likely due to the power of priming.
The subject’s gaze directs the viewer’s attention
Not only are we automatically drawn to people’s faces, but we also direct our attention in the direction the person is gazing. The process through which a person deploys their…
