Eye movement strategies in face ethnicity categorization vs. face identification tasks

Chakravarthula, Puneeth; Tsank, Yuliy; Eckstein, Miguel P.

doi:10.1016/j.visres.2021.05.007

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Another possibility is that we have selected the target image with the nose and mouth shape that stood out from the rest of the images. This could make the target look different from the Asian face and cause the person to identify the ethnic race rather than the facial identity as people tend to focus on the eyes when identifying a face identity, whereas looking at the mouth when identifying the ethnic (Chakravarthula et al, 2021). From our results, we could interpret that partial face cognition might rely on holistic face processing if we have the important features of the face in the right position and structural face processing depending on the individual.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kano and Tomonaga (2010) found that humans and chimpanzees focused on facial features by looking at the eyes first, then the mouth. Chakravarthula et al (2021) found that people focus on the eyes during the face identification task and focus on the mouth during the ethnic group categorization task. Since the pandemic, researchers also have eyes on partial face cognition, performed an experiment using an eye tracker on the masked face cognition task, and found that the mask reduced cognitive ability (Hsiao et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Partial Face Visibility and Facial Cognition: An Electroencephalography and Eye-Tracking Investigation

Chanpornpakdi,

Wongsawat,

Tanaka

2023

Preprint

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Face masks became a part of everyday life in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Previous studies showed that the face cognition mechanism involves holistic face processing, and the absence of face features could lower cognition ability. This is opposed to the experience during the pandemic, when people were able to correctly recognize faces, although the mask covered a part of the face. This paper shows a strong correlation in face cognition based on the EEG and eye-tracking data between the full and partial faces. We observed two event-related potentials, P3a in the frontal lobe and P3b in the parietal lobe, as subcomponents of P300. Both P3a and P3b were lowered when the eyes were invisible, and P3a evoked by the nose covered was larger than the full face. The eye-tracking data showed that 16 out of 18 participants focused on the eyes associated with the EEG results. Our results demonstrate that the eyes are the most crucial feature of facial cognition. Moreover, the face with the nose covered might enhance cognition ability due to the visual working memory capacity. Our experiment shows the possibility of people recognizing faces using both holistic face processing and structural face processing. Furthermore, people can recognize the masked face as well as the full face in similar cognition patterns due to the high correlation in the cognition mechanism.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partial Face Visibility and Facial Cognition: An Electroencephalography and Eye-Tracking Investigation

Chanpornpakdi,

Wongsawat,

Tanaka

2023

Preprint

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“…However, we argue that our results are broadly consistent with a growing body of evidence that strengthens the validity of the claim that differences in the long-term visual experience of faces exist between upper and lower lookers. Firstly, human PFL is very consistent across a wide range of tasks such as person, emotion, and gender recognition (Peterson & Eckstein, 2012 ) and even challenging tasks such as ethnicity categorization (Chakravarthula et al, 2021 ). While this list of tasks is by no means exhaustive, it demonstrates the use of a consistent viewing strategy across a variety of common face-viewing contexts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A preference to look closer to the eyes is associated with a position-invariant face neural code

Chakravarthula,

Eckstein

2023

Psychon Bull Rev

Self Cite

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When looking at faces, humans invariably move their eyes to a consistent preferred first fixation location on the face. While most people have the preferred fixation location just below the eyes, a minority have it between the nose-tip and mouth. Not much is known about whether these long-term differences in the preferred fixation location are associated with distinct neural representations of faces. To study this, we used a gaze-contingent face adaptation aftereffect paradigm to test in two groups of observers, one with their mean preferred fixation location closer to the eyes (upper lookers) and the other closer to the mouth (lower lookers). In this task, participants were required to maintain their gaze at either their own group’s mean preferred fixation location or that of the other group during adaptation and testing. The two possible fixation locations were 3.6° apart on the face. We measured the face adaptation aftereffects when the adaptation and testing happened while participants maintained fixation at either the same or different locations on the face. Both groups showed equally strong adaptation effects when the adaptation and testing happened at the same fixation location. Crucially, only the upper lookers showed a partial transfer of the FAE across the two fixation locations, when adaptation occurred at the eyes. Lower lookers showed no spatial transfer of the FAE irrespective of the adaptation position. Given the classic finding that neural tuning is increasingly position invariant as one moves higher in the visual hierarchy, this result suggests that differences in the preferred fixation location are associated with distinct neural representations of faces.

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“…Subsequent research demonstrated that when humans are executing specific tasks such as searching for an object or person [8][9][10], executing a motor action such as making a peanut butter sandwich, navigating in an environment [11][12][13], or identifying faces [14], they do not look at the most salient object/region but instead look at locations that contain objects or visual features relevant to the task [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], or at locations that allow maximizing task accuracy [25,26].…”

Section: Mainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye Movements during Free Viewing Maximize Scene Understanding

Murlidaran,

Eckstein

2024

Preprint

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Eye movements when observers are presented with a scene without a specific task (free viewing) have been explained in terms of guidance by saliency and, more recently, by a region's meaningfulness. We show that free-viewing eye movements are more frequently directed to objects critical to global scene understanding rather than salient or locally meaningful regions. The free-viewing fixations are similar to those of observers instructed to describe scenes. Small visual alterations that change a scene’s meaning, but not the most salient or locally meaningful object, alter where observers fixate. By having observers describe the scene while maintaining fixation on different objects, we show that fixations during free viewing are functionally important to extract the scene's meaning. Thus, we conclude that during free viewing of scenes, observers seek to extract scene meaning and direct frequent eye movements to objects that maximize scene understanding.

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Eye movement strategies in face ethnicity categorization vs. face identification tasks

Cited by 8 publications

References 30 publications

Partial Face Visibility and Facial Cognition: An Electroencephalography and Eye-Tracking Investigation

Partial Face Visibility and Facial Cognition: An Electroencephalography and Eye-Tracking Investigation

A preference to look closer to the eyes is associated with a position-invariant face neural code

Eye Movements during Free Viewing Maximize Scene Understanding

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