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by Spektrum der Wissenschaft
Does everyone watch in their own way?
1.4.2026
Translation: machine translated
A camera tracks a person's eye movements - and that person can then be clearly identified. Sounds like science fiction, but it already works amazingly well under laboratory conditions.
More than half of people can be recognised simply by the way they look at a picture. This was the result of a study at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Rovereto, Italy. The research group led by Sarah Crockford and Michael Lombardo reports in «Psychological Science» that they have created individual profiles of eye movements - a kind of «barcode» for gaze patterns. They developed the technique on a sample of around 150 adult volunteers from Italy and Germany.
Each test subject looked at 700 images for three seconds at a time, which took around an hour including short breaks. After around one to two weeks, the test subjects went through the entire procedure again. The researchers then calculated a separate «heat map» for each person and each image - a map that shows which points on a particular image were fixated for more or less time. They then compared the maps created during the first and second sessions using the fixation data: Was the similarity between the maps of one and the same person greater than the similarity with the maps of all other people? In this case, the person would actually have been recognised by their gaze.
Not everyone shows a typical gaze pattern
When the gaze patterns were averaged across all 700 images, the team was able to identify almost half of the female subjects and almost two thirds of the male subjects based on their profile. The hit rate did drop when only a single image category, for example animal images, was used. However, even the eye profile for a single image was still sufficient to recognise the participants better than would have been possible by chance. However, there were also people whose eye movements were less consistent and therefore less easy to recognise. According to self-reports, this group was more prone to personality traits that are typical of autism spectrum disorders.
The extent to which the results can be transferred to the moving, natural environment is unclear. As the group reports, in studies using films instead of images, the method only proved successful in 30 to 40 per cent of cases. The researchers also point out that the spread of eye tracking, for example in virtual reality goggles, could harbour great potential for the method on the one hand, but also for its misuse on the other.
Spectrum of science
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Spektrum der Wissenschaft
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