Abstract
Previous studies have demonstrated a left perceptual bias while looking at faces, due to the fact that observers mainly use information from the left side of a face (from the observer's point of view) to perform a judgment task. Such a bias is consistent with the right hemisphere dominance for face processing and has sometimes been linked to a left gaze bias, i.e. more and/or longer fixations on the left side of the face. Here, we recorded eye-movements, in two different experiments during a gender judgment task, using normal and chimeric faces which were presented above, below, right or left to the central fixation point or on it (central position). Participants performed the judgment task by remaining fixated on the fixation point or after executing several saccades (up to three). A left perceptual bias was not systematically found as it depended on the number of allowed saccades and face position. Moreover, the gaze bias clearly depended on the face position as the initial fixation was guided by face position and landed on the closest half-face, toward the center of gravity of the face. The analysis of the subsequent fixations revealed that observers move their eyes from one side to the other. More importantly, no apparent link between gaze and perceptual biases was found here. This implies that we do not look necessarily toward the side of the face that we use to make a gender judgment task. Despite the fact that these results may be limited by the absence of perceptual and gaze biases in some conditions, we emphasized the inter-individual differences observed in terms of perceptual bias, hinting at the importance of performing individual analysis and drawing attention to the influence of the method used to study this bias.
Highlights
Faces are of crucial interest as they create and fashion our social interactions
The gender judgment task differs from a recognition task as it may involve a different processing of the face which is mostly based on the analysis of distances between facial features
For top and bottom presentations, the eccentricities of these different vertical distances differed and might disrupt the processing of some of these facial features
Summary
Faces are of crucial interest as they create and fashion our social interactions. By looking at faces, we are able to extract much information very quickly such as gender, age, emotional state, identity and even personality traits of individuals [1,2]. Since the advent of the first model for face processing presented by Bruce and Young [3], many researchers have investigated the way people process facial identities, expressions or features [4,5,6,7] and their cerebral bases [8,9,10]. The recording of eye movements was used to observe the early stages of face processing (i.e., scanning while encoding a face) and the cognitive strategies that may be expressed in the scanning pattern. Where a face identification task involves a pattern of fixations distributed all over the face, a gender judgment involves longer fixations on the face’s eyes (unpublished data cited in [13]). We focus on the relationship between the perceptual and oculomotor processes that are involved in face perception, using a facial gender judgment task
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