Abstract
This study investigated whether training-related improvements in facial expression categorization are facilitated by spontaneous changes in gaze behaviour in adults and nine-year old children. Four sessions of a self-paced, free-viewing training task required participants to categorize happy, sad and fear expressions with varying intensities. No instructions about eye movements were given. Eye-movements were recorded in the first and fourth training session. New faces were introduced in session four to establish transfer-effects of learning. Adults focused most on the eyes in all sessions and increased expression categorization accuracy after training coincided with a strengthening of this eye-bias in gaze allocation. In children, training-related behavioural improvements coincided with an overall shift in gaze-focus towards the eyes (resulting in more adult-like gaze-distributions) and towards the mouth for happy faces in the second fixation. Gaze-distributions were not influenced by the expression intensity or by the introduction of new faces. It was proposed that training enhanced the use of a uniform, predominantly eyes-biased, gaze strategy in children in order to optimise extraction of relevant cues for discrimination between subtle facial expressions.
Highlights
Humans rely on emotional expressions of others to interpret social situations and to flexibly adjust behaviour to the social environment
The present study revealed that training-related improvements in facial expression categorization coincided with changes in gaze distribution in face exploration for all three expressions in children and for sad expressions in adults, supporting the assumption that enhancements in expression recognition is facilitated by spontaneous changes in gaze-strategy
Children’s gaze behaviour was characterized by a pronounced shift in focus towards the eyes after training, resulting in more adult-like gaze distributions. This focus was not influenced by expression intensity at any stage of training, consistent with previous findings [19], or by the introduction of new faces in session four, suggesting transfer-effects of learning
Summary
Humans rely on emotional expressions of others to interpret social situations and to flexibly adjust behaviour to the social environment. The ability to recognize facial expressions improves greatly with age in childhood [3,4,5] and continues to develop in adolescence for more complex and subtle expressions [5,6]. This improvement has been attributed to the development of relevant cognitive and perceptual capacities, as well as increasing practice and exposure over time [4,5,7,8]. Izard et al [10] showed that better skills in facial expression recognition in 5-year-old children positively predicted social and academic outcomes four years later
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