Several previous studies of eye movements have put forward that, during face recognition, Easterners spread their attention across a greater part of their visual field than Westerners. Recently, we found that culture's effect on the perception of faces reaches mechanisms deeper than eye movements, therefore affecting the very nature of information sampled by the visual system: that is, Westerners globally rely more than Easterners on fine-grained visual information (i.e. high spatial frequencies; SFs), whereas Easterners rely more on coarse-grained visual information (i.e. low SFs). These findings suggest that culture influences basic visual processes; however, the temporal onset and dynamics of these culturespecific perceptual differences are still unknown. Here, we investigate the time course of SF use in Western Caucasian (Canadian) and East Asian (Chinese) observers during a face identification task. Firstly, our results confirm that Easterners use relatively lower SFs than Westerners, while the latter use relatively higher SFs. More importantly, our results indicate that these differences arise as early as 34 ms after stimulus onset, and remain stable through time. Our research supports the hypothesis that Westerners and Easterners initially rely on different types of visual information during face processing.Perception is the process through which sensory information is organized, categorized and interpreted so as to create a meaningful subjective representation of the outside world. In this sense, perception can be viewed as an inferential process through which sensory input is associated to signification: for long, it has been a widely accepted theory that visual perception involves "unconscious inferences" -i.e. automatic assumptions about the way physical stimuli should appear -based on one's memories, expectations and attention (see e.g. ref.1 ), and generally, that world knowledge is central to how humans process visual information 2 . That said, the way knowledge about the world is acquired can vary from one culture to another, along with the type of implicit rules that lead to meaningful inferences about visual sensation (see e.g. refs.3,4 ). These culturally circumscribed implicit rules are essential to understand how visual information is coded and associated to stored knowledge. Nonetheless, theories on how visual information is represented and processed have, for decades, rested solely on empirical data from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies 5 , and thus, cannot necessarily be generalized to other populations.As a response, cross-cultural perspectives on human perception have gained increasing interest since the 20th century. For instance, ongoing research has been investigating the influence of culture on the processing of information contained in visual stimuli, and exposed striking differences in the way Western and Eastern cultures allocate their attention across their field of vision [6][7][8][9] . As a matter of fact, culture seems to impact visual p...

Recognizing facial expressions is crucial for the success of social interactions, and the visual processes underlying this ability have been the subject of many studies in the field of face perception. Nevertheless, the stimuli used in the majority of these studies consist of facial expressions that were produced on request rather than spontaneously induced. In the present study, we directly compared the visual strategies underlying the recognition of posed and spontaneous expressions of happiness, disgust, surprise, and sadness. We used the Bubbles method with pictures of the same individuals spontaneously expressing an emotion or posing with an expression on request. Two key findings were obtained: Visual strategies were less systematic with spontaneous than with posed expressions, suggesting a higher heterogeneity in the useful facial cues across identities; and with spontaneous expressions, the relative reliance on the mouth and eyes areas was more evenly distributed, contrasting with the higher reliance on the mouth compared to the eyes area observed with posed expressions.

Facial expressions of emotion play a key role in social interactions. While in everyday life, their dynamic and transient nature calls for a fast processing of the visual information they contain, a majority of studies investigating the visual processes underlying their recognition have focused on their static display. The present study aimed to gain a better understanding of these processes while using more ecological dynamic facial expressions. In two experiments, we directly compared the spatial frequency (SF) tuning during the recognition of static and dynamic facial expressions. Experiment 1 revealed a shift toward lower SFs for dynamic expressions in comparison to static ones. Experiment 2 was designed to verify if changes in SF tuning curves were specific to the presence of emotional information in motion by comparing the SF tuning profiles for static, dynamic, and shuffled dynamic expressions. Results showed a similar shift toward lower SFs for shuffled expressions, suggesting that the difference found between dynamic and static expressions might not be linked to informative motion per se but to the presence of motion regardless its nature.

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Effectively communicating pain is crucial for human beings. Facial expressions are one of the most specific forms of behavior associated with pain, but the way culture shapes expectations about the intensity with which pain is typically facially conveyed, and the visual strategies deployed to decode pain intensity in facial expressions, is poorly understood. The present study used a data-driven approach to compare two cultures, namely East Asians and Westerners, with respect to their mental representations of pain facial expressions (experiment 1 , N =60; experiment 2 , N =74) and their visual information utilization during the discrimination of facial expressions of pain of different intensities (experiment 3 ; N =60). Results reveal that compared to Westerners, East Asians expect more intense pain expressions (experiments 1 and 2 ), need more signal, and do not rely as much as Westerners on core facial features of pain expressions to discriminate between pain intensities (experiment 3 ). Together, those findings suggest that cultural norms regarding socially accepted pain behaviors shape the expectations about pain facial expressions and decoding visual strategies. Furthermore, they highlight the complexity of emotional facial expressions and the importance of studying pain communication in multicultural settings. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00186-1.