Introduction

Watch where you're watching! Apparently, where your eyes look can be used to predict things about your personality. Could this be the personality test of the future? Neil and Rob discuss how your eyes predict your personality and teach you related vocabulary.

This week's question

The letters 'AI' stand for Artificial Intelligence but what are the letters 'AI'? Are they

A) an abbreviation

B) an acronym, or

C) an initialism?

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

extrovert
someone who has a very outgoing personality, confident and socially comfortable.

introvert
someone who is shy and not comfortable in social situations and doesn’t like being the centre of attention.

findings
the results and conclusions of research

unconstrained
without control or restriction

gaze
the way that someone looks at someone

figured out
understood something after studying it

Transcript 

Note: This is not a word for word transcript

Neil
Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I'm Neil.

Rob
And I'm Rob.

Neil
Now, Rob, would you say that you are an introvert or an extrovert?

Rob
What a good question! Well, extroverts are confident in their personality. They're outgoing and comfortable in social situations. So, I would have to say that, if anything, I’m the opposite. I’m more of an introvert. I’m really quite shy. I feel uncomfortable in social situations. For example, if I go to a party, where I don’t know anyone I usually feel very embarrassed and I find it impossible to start conversations with strangers.

Neil
But you do all of this on the radio and videos for Learning English, don’t you? Some would say you have to be an extrovert to do what we do.

Rob
Ah! Well, maybe I’m pretending to be an extrovert to hide the fact that I’m an introvert. It’s quite a common thing, you know.

Neil
Well, it might not be so easy to hide in the future because researchers have developed a computer program that can tell your personality from looking at where you look, by tracking your eye movements.

Rob
Wow! That sounds pretty hi-tech, and scary.

Neil
Well, we’ll learn more shortly, but first a question on the topic of clever computers. The letters 'AI' stand for Artificial Intelligence but what are the letters 'AI'? Are they

A) an abbreviation

B) an acronym, or

C) an initialism?

Rob
OK, I thought that was going to be easy, but I think it’s an abbreviation, isn’t it?

Neil
Well, you’ll have to wait to the end of the programme to find out! Sabrina Hoppe is a researcher at the University of Stuttgart. She was interviewed on the BBC Radio programme All In The Mind. She spoke about an experiment in which they tracked the eye movements of people in real situations. This is what she said about the research. Was she confident the experiment would work in the real world?

Sabrina Hoppe
The main finding in our study is that it is possible at all to just look at eye movements and then predict something about their personality. And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements in such an unconstrained real world setting.

Neil

So, was she confident this would work?

Rob
No, not really. She said that before the study it wasn’t clear if it would be possible in an unconstrained real-world setting. Unconstrained here means that there wasn’t strict control over the conditions of the experiment. It took place in the ‘real-world’ – so not in a laboratory.

Neil
The result of the experiment - or the finding, as she called it - was that by following eye movements, a computer programme was able to work out the personality of the subjects. Let’s listen again.

Sabrina Hoppe
The main finding in our study is that it is possible at all to just look at eye movements and then predict something about their personality. And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements in such an unconstrained real world setting.

Rob
So how does the software work, for example, what are the differences in the eye movements of extroverts compared to introverts?

Sabrina Hoppe
We still don't really know in detail what makes the difference. We can only tell that there are differences and that we know computer programs that can pick up those differences. Maybe extrovert people look up a lot because they want to look at people's faces, whereas some super introvert person maybe just stares at their own shoes, if you want to take the extreme examples. So, probably it somehow changes gaze. But we only know that this information is there and somehow our program figured out how to extract it.

Neil
So how does it work?

Rob
Well, that’s the strange thing. She said that she didn’t really know, at least not in detail. She did say that our personality somehow changes gaze. Gaze is another word for looking at something. So maybe we gaze in different ways depending on our personality. Extroverts may look up more and introverts, like me, may look down more.

Neil
Yes, it was interesting that she said that she didn’t know how it did it, but the program somehow managed to figure it out. The phrasal verb to figure something out means 'to understand or realise something'.  Time to review today’s vocabulary, but first, let’s have the answer to the quiz question. I asked what are the letters AI? Are they

A) an abbreviation

B) an acronym

C) an initialism

Rob, what did you say?

Rob
I said A) an abbreviation.

Neil
Well sorry, no, AI is C), so to speak. It's an initialism. It’s the first letters of the words 'artificial intelligence', but it’s not pronounced like a new word, just the initial letters. Right, time now to review today’s vocabulary.

Rob
Yes. We had the word extrovert. This describes someone who has a very outgoing personality. An extrovert is confident and socially comfortable.

Neil
By contrast, an introvert is someone who is shy and not comfortable in social situations and doesn’t like being the centre of attention.

Rob
Our report today talked about the findings of some new research. A finding is something that has been learnt, discovered or indeed, found out. It is the conclusion that is reached.

Neil
Then we had unconstrained to describe the experiment which was not carried out in a controlled environment. So unconstrained means 'not limited or restricted'.

Rob
Our next word was gaze. This is a word that means 'our way of looking at something'.

Neil
Yes, the findings of the research suggest that our personality can affect our gaze.

Rob
And this was something the computer was able to figure out. To figure out means 'to study something and reach an answer to a particular question or problem'.

Neil
Right! Well, you know what I’ve just figured out?

Rob
Do tell!

Neil
It’s time to bring this edition of 6 Minute English to an end. We hope you can join us again, but until then we are bbclearningenglish.com and you can find us on social media, online and on our app. Bye for now.

Rob

Bye-bye!