The center of a face catches the eye in face perception.

Abstract

Using the "Don't look" (DL) paradigm, wherein participants are asked not to look at a specific feature (i.e., eye, nose, and mouth), we previously documented that Easterners struggled to completely avoid fixating on the eyes and nose. Their underlying mechanisms for attractiveness may differ because the fixations on the eyes were triggered only reflexively, whereas fixations on the nose were consistently elicited. In this study, we predominantly focused on the nose, where the center-of-gravity (CoG) effect, which refers to a person's tendency to look near an object's CoG, could be confounded. Full-frontal and mid-profile faces were used because the latter's CoG did not correspond to the nose location. Although we hypothesized that these two effects are independent, the results indicated that, in addition to the successful tracing of previous studies, the CoG effect explains the nose-attracting effect. This study not only reveals this explanation but also raises a question regarding the CoG effect on Eastern participants.