Studying the Influence of Gender on Gaze Point of Cinema Viewers with Eye Tracker Headset: The Case of Separation Movie

Cinema is a visual-based art, so the visual mechanism, which is the path to understanding the beauty of this art, should be recognized. Sight and everything that makes sense in this way are fundamental aspects of cinematic studies. During the life of cinema, how to watch a film has been repeatedly examined from a variety of perspectives. Transplantation of neuroscience, vision and cinema are new approaches that have been addressed over the last decade. So far, many studies have been conducted on the gender and cognitive differences of cinema audiences. Oversight studies are needed to prove the perceptual differences between the sexes that Neurocinematics studies provide this opportunity for cinema analysts. The present study aims to provide preliminary evidence for gender differences in eye movement patterns when watching a sequence of "separation" film. To do this, subjects, consisting of six men and six women, aged between 20 and 30, were exposed to three minutes of the opening sequence of a movie, in which the leading actor and actress are engaged in dialogue while facing the camera. We have focused on four five-second scenes. In the first scene, both actor and actress are silent, in the second scene, only the actress is speaking and the actor is silent and both are facing the camera, while in the third scene the actor is speaking and the actress is silent. In the last scene, the actor and the actress are quarreling and talking at the same time. Gaze points have been recorded by an eye-tracker. Eye tracking provides an objective measure of the visual patterns of participants that allow us to determine which elements in the picture are first and foremost concerned. This data can be used to determine the user's priorities. Detecting user behavioral changes allows us to recognize the tastes of users. The process of tracking how a person watches items on a movie involves two issues: saccades and fixation. The saccade is the simultaneous movement of the eyes in the same direction as it jumps from one fixation point to another. Although simultaneous, the eyes must pause on a specific area of the screen, and this is known as the fixation. The results indicate that both male and female observers gaze firstly at the speaker. They also suggest that whenever one of the characters is speaking, the observer of the same gender pays more attention to them. The audiences pay remarkable attention to the same gender when he or she is silent. These observations unveil important aspects of human gaze patterns and particularly reveal important gender differences of eye movement patterns. The findings of this study, on the one hand, reveal important aspects of visual patterns and, in particular, important gender differences. On the other hand, this study could be a good foundation for developing gender studies in cinema with the help of new tools, from the perspective of the study of Neurocinematics to the opening of the new window to cinema studies, to clarify some uncharted research in this field.