732 JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY
A. The Impact of the Eye Region on Perception of the FaceHumans, from their earliest stages of life, are drawn to the
eye region.^27 In fact, infants recognize eyes before they are able
to recognize faces.^28 The eyes play a critical role in developing
perceptions of the face.^29 The eye region is also fundamental to
nonverbal communication because emotions, attention, and
intentions are all perceived through observing one’s eye gaze.^30
For example, wide-open eyes signal the emotions of surprise and
fear.^31 A study designed specifically to measure the relative time
a subject looks at the eye region during a “social impression-
formation task” revealed that eyes are the facial feature that
people spend the most time analyzing.^32 When presented with
static facial displays,^33 subjects spent 43.4% of their visual
inspection time on the eye region and only 12.6% of their visual
inspection time on the mouth region.^34 The social impression-
formation task is pertinent in a courtroom setting because a
TODAY (Sept. 15, 2011), http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/LIFE/usaedition/
2011-09-15-eyeglass-frames_ST_U.htm.
(^27) Jellesma, supra note 20, at 2.
(^28) M.J. Taylor et al., Eyes First! Eye Processing Develops Before Face
Processing in Children, 12 NEUROREPORT 1671, 1676 (2001).
(^29) Dan Nemrodov and Roxane J. Itier, The Role of Eyes in Early Face
Processing: A Rapid Adaptation Study of the Inversion Effect, 102 BRIT. J.
PSYCHOL. 783, 793 (2011).
(^30) R.J. Itier & M. Batty, Neural Bases of Eye and Gaze Processing: The
Core of Social Cognition, 33 NEUROSCIENCE & BIOBEHAVIORAL REVS. 843,
844 (2009) (noting that “the human brain has developed a very complex
cognitive system of gaze direction analysis based on perceptual elements of
faces and eyes”).
(^31) Id. at 845.
(^32) Stephen W. Janik et al., Eyes as the Center of Focus in the Visual
Examination of Human Faces, 47 PERCEPTUAL & MOTOR SKILLS 857, 857–58
(1978); see also Leder et al., supra note 24, at 211 (noting that eyes are
located in a “prominent position in the visual field”).
(^33) Static facial displays depict no movement in the facial region of the
person shown in the slide. Janik et al., supra note 32, at 858.
(^34) Subjects spent a greater portion of their looking time on the eye region
as compared to the hair, nose, ear, or mouth regions, regardless of the facial
expression or sex of the person depicted in the slide. Id.