Eye-Tracking During Computerized Social Cognition Tasks in Healthy Adults: Feasibility and Task-Dependent Gaze Patterns in a Pilot Study

Background: Social-cognition assessment often relies on endpoint measures such as accuracy, which provide limited information about how social stimuli are visually sampled. Eye-tracking can capture visual-sampling processes, but the meaning of gaze metrics depends on task structure. Objective: To examine the feasibility and preliminary informativeness of eye-tracking during two computerized social-cognition tasks in healthy adults. Methods: Nineteen healthy adults completed a full-face facial emotion-recognition task (TREC) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) while gaze was recorded. Measures included fixation count, cumulative fixation duration, and reaction time. TREC analyses examined gaze allocation across the eyes, nose, mouth, and facial hemifields. Analyses were exploratory and hypothesis-generating. Results: In the TREC, gaze was mainly allocated to the eyes and nose, with less sampling of the mouth. Higher TREC performance was accompanied by greater eye-region and left-hemiface viewing. Negative expressions elicited more fixations, and older participants showed greater eye-region sampling. In the RMET, participants showed higher fixation count, longer cumulative fixation duration, and longer response time than in the TREC, but gaze metrics were not clearly associated with demographic or performance variables. Conclusions: Eye-tracking was feasible and yielded coherent, task-dependent visual-sampling patterns in this small pilot sample. Full-face stimuli enabled spatially resolved gaze characterization, whereas eye-region stimuli mainly provided global inspection metrics. Findings are preliminary and should inform larger studies testing the clinical or mechanistic value of gaze-derived measures.