Artificial intelligence can read personality from eye movements

AI has been found to recognise four of the Big Five personality traits

Eyes, truly are the windows to the soul. Especially when there is artificial intelligence to decode them.

New research reveals that your eyes may also be an indicator of your personality type, simply by the way they move.

It was done by the University of South Australia in partnership with the University of Stuttgart, Flinders University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany. It uses state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms to demonstrate a link between personality and eye movements.

Findings show that people’s eye movements reveal whether they are sociable, conscientious or curious. The algorithm software reliably recognised four of the Big Five personality traits: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

The algorithm software reliably recognised four of the Big Five personality traits: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness

Researchers tracked the eye movements of 42 participants as they undertook everyday tasks around a university campus, and subsequently assessed their personality traits using well-established questionnaires.

UniSA’s Dr Tobias Loetscher says the study provides new links between previously under-investigated eye movements and personality traits. It delivers important insights for emerging fields of social signal processing and social robotics.

“There’s certainly the potential for these findings to improve human-machine interactions,” Dr Loetscher says.

“People are always looking for improved, personalised services. However, today’s robots and computers are not socially aware, so they cannot adapt to non-verbal cues. This research provides opportunities to develop robots and computers so that they can become more natural, and better at interpreting human social signals,” he added.