When observing point light walkers orthographically projected onto a frontoparallel plane, the direction in which they are walking is ambiguous. Nevertheless, observers more often perceive them as facing towards than as facing away from them. This phenomenon is known as the “facing-the-viewer bias” (FTV). Two interpretations of the facing-the-viewer bias exist in the literature: a top-down and a bottom-up interpretation. Support for the top-down interpretation comes from evidence that social anxiety correlates with the FTV bias. However, the direction of the relationship between the FTV bias and social anxiety is inconsistent across studies and evidence for a correlation has mostly been obtained with relatively small samples. Therefore, the first aim of the current study was to provide a strong test of the hypothesized relationship between social anxiety and the facing-the-viewer bias in a large sample of 200 participants recruited online. In addition, a second aim was to further extend top-down accounts by investigating if the FTV bias is also related to autistic traits. Our results replicate the FTV bias, showing that people indeed tend to perceive orthographically projected point light walkers as facing towards them. However, no correlation between the FTV bias and social interaction anxiety (tau = −0.01, p = .86, BF = 0.18) or autistic traits (tau = −0.0039, p = .45, BF = 0.18) was found. As such, our data cannot confirm the top-down interpretation of the facing-the-viewer bias.

当观察点射光的步行者正射投影在平行于平面的平面上时，他们的行进方向是不明确的。然而，观察者更多地将他们视为面对而不是背弃他们。这种现象被称为“面对观众的偏见”（FTV）。文献中存在面对观众偏见的两种解释：自上而下和自下而上的解释。对自上而下的解释的支持来自社交焦虑与FTV偏见相关的证据。然而，在整个研究中，FTV偏向和社交焦虑之间关系的方向是不一致的，并且相关性的证据大部分是通过相对较小的样本获得的。所以，本研究的第一个目标是，对200名在线招募的参与者进行大量研究，以检验社交焦虑与面对观众偏见之间的假设关系。此外，第二个目标是通过调查FTV偏见是否也与自闭症特征有关来进一步扩展自上而下的帐户。我们的结果重现了FTV的偏见，表明人们确实倾向于将正交投影的点光助行器感知为面向他们。但是，FTV偏见与社交互动焦虑之间没有相关性（表明人们确实倾向于将正交投影的点光步行者视为面向他们。但是，FTV偏见与社交互动焦虑之间没有相关性（表明人们确实倾向于将正交投影的点光步行者视为面向他们。但是，FTV偏见与社交互动焦虑之间没有相关性（tau  = -0.01，p  = .86，BF  = 0.18）或自闭性特征（tau  = -0.0039，p  = .45，BF  = 0.18）。因此，我们的数据无法确认自顶向下对观看者的偏见的解释。