Abstract
The emergence of cultural differences in face scanning is thought to be shaped by social experience. However, previous studies mainly investigated eye movements of adults and little is known about early development. The current study recorded eye movements of British and Japanese infants (aged 10 and 16 months) and adults, who were presented with static and dynamic faces on screen. Cultural differences were observed across all age groups, with British participants exhibiting more mouth scanning, and Japanese individuals showing increased central face (nose) scanning for dynamic stimuli. Age-related influences independent of culture were also revealed, with a shift from eye to mouth scanning between 10 and 16 months, while adults distributed their gaze more flexibly. Against our prediction, no age-related increases in cultural differences were observed, suggesting the possibility that cultural differences are largely manifest by 10 months of age. Overall, the findings suggest that individuals adopt visual strategies in line with their cultural background from early in infancy, pointing to the development of a highly adaptive face processing system that is shaped by early sociocultural experience.
Highlights
The human face represents an important visual stimulus in our everyday life, allowing us to identify others, infer emotional states, and participate in shared attention (Bruce & Young, 1998; Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000; Hoffman & Haxby, 2000)
Given that early cultural differences have previously been observed by the end of the first year of life, we examined face scanning in 10-month-old infants
Significant cultural differences were not observed for eye scanning in any of the face stimulus types used in the current study, thereby not supporting the greater triangular scanning for static and dynamic-neutral faces in British compared to Japanese participants, and not supporting increased eye looking for dynamic-expressive faces in Japanese compared to British participants
Summary
The human face represents an important visual stimulus in our everyday life, allowing us to identify others, infer emotional states, and participate in shared attention (Bruce & Young, 1998; Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000; Hoffman & Haxby, 2000). Over the course of the first year of life, recognition abilities become increasingly optimised for faces of a shared ethnic background, but not for faces of less familiar ethnicities (Anzures, Quinn, Pascalis, Slater, & Lee, 2013; Anzures, Pascalis, Quinn, Slater, & Lee, 2011; Kelly et al, 2007, 2009) This process of perceptual narrowing reflects an adaptive mechanism for fine-tuning to socially relevant infor mation (Nelson, 2001), challenging the notion that processes underlying face perception are universal and highlighting the role of postnatal social experience in the development of expert face processing. In recognition tasks for faces with neutral expressions, Western Caucasian (WC) participants exhibited greater scanning of the eyes and mouth than East Asian (EA) participants, whereas EAs showed more fixations on the nose than WCs
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