MAPPING FACE RECOGNITION INFORMATION USE ACROSS CULTURES

Sébastien Miellet¹*, Luca Vizioli¹, Lingnan He², Xinyue Zhou³ and Roberto Caldara¹*

• ¹Department of Psychology and Fribourg Center for Cognition, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland
• ²School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China
• ³Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China

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.
Keywords: face perception, culture, eye movements, gaze-contingent, expanding spotlight, extrafoveal processing
Citation: Miellet S, Vizioli L, He L, Zhou X and Caldara R (2013) Mapping face recognition information use across cultures. Front. Psychology 4:34. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00034

Received: 15 September 2012; Accepted: 15 January 2013;
Published online: 20 February 2013.

Edited by:
Tamara L. Watson, University of Western Sydney, Australia

Reviewed by:
Chris I. Baker, National Institutes of Health, USA
Corrado Caudek, Università di Firenze, Italy

Copyright: © 2013 Miellet, Vizioli, He, Zhou and Caldara. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.
*Correspondence: Sébastien Miellet and Roberto Caldara, Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Rue Faucigny 2, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland. e-mail: sebastien.miellet@unifr.ch; roberto.caldara@unifr.ch
http://www.frontiersin.org/Perception_Science/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00034/abstract

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