Face processing
How do we look at our own face compared with a stranger's?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People spent relatively more time looking at the lower half of faces they judged to be their own, and those with a sharper mental image of their own face looked more at the eye region of their own face.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject self-face recognition task with individually made self-to-novel face morphs (15 morph levels, two runs of 150 trials) and simultaneous eye-tracking of upper vs lower face regions; AQ measured afterwards.
- N
- N=33 · 33 healthy adults (2 male); some individual-difference correlations excluded influential data points.
- Population
- Right-handed university students and community adults around the University of Reading, mean age 20.67 years, mostly female.
- Outcome
- Gaze duration and proportion to upper (eyes) vs lower (mouth) face regions for faces judged 'self' vs 'other'; slope of the psychometric self-recognition curve; Autism Spectrum Quotient scores.
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Key findings
Faces judged as 'self' drew a greater proportion of gaze to the lower (mouth) region than faces judged as 'other' (effect size r = 0.42), because looking at the lower face lasted longer while looking at the eyes was similar for both identities. People with steeper self-recognition curves looked relatively longer at the upper face of 'self' versus 'other' faces (Kendall's tau = 0.23). Autistic traits were not related to where people looked on the face, but higher traits were linked to less total looking time at both self and other faces.
Methodology
33 adults were photographed and their face was morphed with a same-sex, same-ethnicity stranger in 15 steps from fully self to fully other. On each trial a morph appeared briefly and participants pressed a key to say 'self' or 'other' while an eye tracker recorded where they looked. The steepness of each person's self-recognition curve served as a measure of how distinct their self-face representation was, and participants also completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient.
Limitations
The sample was small and almost entirely female (2 men), so gender differences could not be examined and the correlations are modest. The design is correlational for individual differences, so it cannot show whether a distinct self-face representation causes the gaze pattern or vice versa. No familiar-other face was included, so the self-face effects may simply be familiarity effects; faces were static, central, closed-mouth images. Autistic traits were measured in a non-clinical sample in which no one reached the clinical cut-off, so results may not apply to diagnosed autism.
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