Face processing
Do people from different cultures look at faces differently?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Western and East Asian observers recognised faces equally well but gathered the information differently: Westerners fixated the eyes and mouth, while East Asians fixated the centre of the face and used more peripheral vision.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Lab comparison of two cultural groups performing an old/new face recognition task under a novel gaze-contingent 'Expanding Spotlight' that reveals the face only around fixation, growing with fixation duration.
- N
- N=30 · 15 Western Caucasian students (Glasgow) and 15 East Asian students (Guangzhou); analyses used correctly recognised trials.
- Population
- Young adult university students in the UK and China with normal or corrected vision.
- Outcome
- Recognition accuracy and reaction time, global eye-movement measures, and statistical fixation maps of where each group looked on the face.
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Key findings
Accuracy, reaction times and overall eye-movement measures (number and length of fixations, saccade length) did not differ between groups. Western observers spent longer fixating the eyes and mouth (286 vs 106 ms), whereas East Asian observers spent longer on the centre of the face (368 vs 100), with large effect sizes (Cohen's d of 0.92 and 1.06). Reconstructed information maps showed the groups took in different visual input, which the authors argue is hard to reconcile with a single, universal holistic process for faces.
Methodology
Fifteen Western Caucasian and fifteen East Asian students learned faces of both ethnicities and then judged whether faces were old or new, with facial expressions changed between learning and test to prevent simple picture matching. Eye movements were recorded with a gaze-contingent 'Expanding Spotlight': the real face was visible only through a window around the current fixation that grew the longer the person kept looking, with an average face shown elsewhere. The authors built fixation maps for each group and reconstructed the visual information each group actually took in.
Limitations
The groups were small (15 per culture) and were tested at different universities, so differences could partly reflect site, language or other group factors rather than culture alone. The gaze-contingent window changes normal viewing, and the authors concede that tying fixation duration to how much face is revealed could inflate peripheral information. Eye movements show where information was sampled, not what mental representation was formed, so the study cannot prove whether processing was holistic or featural. Culture was not manipulated, so the causes of the bias (e.g. experience or social norms) are not tested.
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