Abstract
Face recognition is not rooted in a universal eye movement information-gathering strategy. Western observers favor a local facial feature sampling strategy, whereas Eastern observers prefer sampling face information from a global, central fixation strategy. Yet, the precise qualitative (the diagnostic) and quantitative (the amount) information underlying these cultural perceptual biases in face recognition remains undetermined. To this end, we monitored the eye movements of Western and Eastern observers during a face recognition task, with a novel gaze-contingent technique: the Expanding Spotlight. We used 2° Gaussian apertures centered on the observers’ fixations expanding dynamically at a rate of 1° every 25 ms at each fixation – the longer the fixation duration, the larger the aperture size. Identity-specific face information was only displayed within the Gaussian aperture; outside the aperture, an average face template was displayed to facilitate saccade planning. Thus, the Expanding Spotlight simultaneously maps out the facial information span at each fixation location. Data obtained with the Expanding Spotlight technique confirmed that Westerners extract more information from the eye region, whereas Easterners extract more information from the nose region. Interestingly, this quantitative difference was paired with a qualitative disparity. Retinal filters based on spatial-frequency decomposition built from the fixations maps revealed that Westerners used local high-spatial-frequency information sampling, covering all the features critical for effective face recognition (the eyes and the mouth). In contrast, Easterners achieved a similar result by using global low-spatial-frequency information from those facial features. Our data show that the face system flexibly engages into local or global eye movement strategies across cultures, by relying on distinct facial information span and culturally tuned spatially filtered information. Overall, our findings challenge the view of a unique putative process for face recognition.
Highlights
Face-processing is a fundamental ability for social animals such as humans
By using gaze-contingent techniques, we have demonstrated that despite using diverse gaze scan paths, observers from both cultures rely on the same diagnostic features to perform face recognition and to reach comparable levels of performance (Caldara et al, 2010; Miellet et al, 2012)
In order to determine the magnitude of the fixation biases across cultures, we extracted, for each observer, the average of the Z -scored fixation durations within the areas showing significant differences in the differential fixation maps for Western Caucasian (WC)-East Asian (EA) (Figure 2)
Summary
Face-processing is a fundamental ability for social animals such as humans. Despite the vast amount of research on this topic, the exact nature and the specificity of the processes involved in this critical biological skill is a matter of ongoing debate. A potential reason for the discrepancies in the theoretical interpretations put forward by different authors might arise from a lack of consensus in the literature on the definition of the nature of the processes thought to be involved: namely the holistic, configural, and featural processing of faces. McKone (2009) defined holistic or configural processing as“a special style of strong perceptual integration of information from across the entire internal region of a face” and acknowledges that “the exact nature of this style of computation is not understood.”. Stating that a particular experimental condition or group of observers is engaging in more holistic, configural, or featural processing for one particular task or another could be misleading if the exact nature of the process involved is not formally defined and all the alternative explanations are not properly discarded
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