Eyes of the Beholder: Dungeons and Dragons monsters help B.C. psychologist’s research

Julian Levy, the 12-year-old son of University of British Columbia psychologist Alan Kingstone (and a hero to many role-players out there, I'm sure, me included), came up with a brilliant solution for his father's research: use monsters from Dungeons and Dragons to study whether people really do focus on other people's eyes to gather social information.

Kingstone has been studying this idea for some time. His (along with Friesen's) research has already shown that people instinctively look where other people are looking, but there was still questions about whether or not people just focus on the faces of others, seeing the other's eyes as a result, or if they were specifically focusing on the eyes. However, it's difficult to figure that out when you can't divorce a person's eyes from their face without permanent damage.

When Kingstone told his son about this problem, Julian came up with a great idea. People and animals may have their eyes limited to their face, but there are many monsters in the popular Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) role-playing game that don't suffer from that limitation. With the variety of monsters found in the game's Monster Manual — some with human-like or animal-like faces, and others with much more alien looks, with multiple heads, multiple eyes, eyes on stalks or tentacles, and even ones with no eyes — it would be very easy to test to see exactly what people are really looking at. Julian's teacher agreed to give him a few days off school to test the idea, and they set to work.

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Julian selected a group of 22 people were for the study, sat them in front of a computer screen and used cameras to track their eye movements. They stared at the corner of the computer screen until they were ready to proceed, at which time they tapped a key, bringing up one of 36 monster images, and let their eyes roam.

Julian's results showed that for monsters with human or human-like bodies, the participants looked to the centre of the screen, and then their eyes shifted upward (presumably towards the face). For monsters with other shapes, they looked at the centre of the screen, and then off in various directions (presumably looking for the eyes). In both cases, the participants quickly found the monsters' eyes and looked at them frequently.

These findings clearly support the idea that, while people generally centre their gaze on the middle of any object they look at, they specifically seek out eyes when gathering social information.

"If people are just targeting the centre of the head, like they target the centre of most objects, and getting the eyes for free, that's one thing. But if they are actually seeking out eyes that's another thing altogether," said Kingstone.

According to the research paper, titled Monsters are people too, the result that humans specifically look at the eyes, rather than just the head "sheds light on individuals with autism who often fail to select the eyes of others," and suggests that efforts to train those with autism to look at others in a 'typical' manner should focus on looking at other peoples' eyes, rather than just at their head.

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Since Julian came up with the idea, designed and conducted the experiment and compiled all the data, he earned the position as first author on the paper, which was written up by Kingstone and his postdoc Tom Foulsham. The paper was published in Royal Society Publishing's Biology Letters on October 31st.

I wonder if I can get my parents to apologize now for calling D&D a waste of time when I was a kid?