Where do people look? Where there’s information

1. BusinessInsider has a great collection of pictures tracking where people actually look when they see an image. (Big takeaway: men love to look at other people’s groins.)

2. Watch the video above: people generally look at the face of the person talking or the object that someone is pointing at. Why? Because that is where the information resides.

3. If you ask someone to look for a hidden target, they will look around in a manner that will give them the most information about where the target may be – this lets them exclude as many locations as possible.

4. But we are social animals, and social animals have a tendency to rely on social information – gathering information from other individuals lets you pass on some of the cost of finding it to others. Humans in crowds will look where other humans are looking – what is going on…