Viewpoint and center of gravity affect eye movements to human faces

Abstract

In everyday life, human faces are encountered in many different views. Despite this fact, most psychological research has focused on the perception of frontal faces. To address this shortcoming, the current study investigated how different face views are processed, by measuring eye movements to frontal, mid-profile and profile faces during a gender categorization (Experiment 1) and a free-viewing task (Experiment 2). In both experiments observers initially fixated the geometric center of a face, independent of face view. This center-of-gravity effect induced a qualitative shift in the features that were sampled across different face views in the time period immediately after stimulus onset. Subsequent eye fixations focused increasingly on specific facial features. At this stage, the eye regions were targeted predominantly in all face views, and to a lesser extent also the nose and the mouth. These findings show that initial saccades to faces are driven by general stimulus properties, before eye movements are redirected to the specific facial features in which observers take an interest. These findings are illustrated in detail by plotting the distribution of fixations, first fixations, and percentage fixations across time.

Removing the own-race bias in face recognition by attentional shift using fixation crosses to diagnostic features: An eye-tracking study

“…All eye-tracking data was recorded until the participants' responded in both the learning and the recognition phase of the experiment. Incidentally, we also conducted an analysis on area-normalised (calculated by dividing the proportion of time spent fixating in the AOI by the proportion of the screen the AOI occupied, see Bindemann, Scheepers, & Burton, 2009;Fletcher-Watson, Findlay, Leekam, & Benson, 2008) AOIs in order to deal with the unequal sizes of the AOIs. These results were identical to the non-normalised data.…”

Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

“…The EEG recording was prepared while the infant was sitting on his/her caregiver's lap. For the recording, an elastic cap was used, in which 27 AgAgCl electrodes were mounted according to the [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] system. The Cz electrode was used as a reference during recording.…”

Early sensitivity for eyes within faces: A new neuronal account of holistic and featural processing

“…It is noteworthy that the N170 latency was shortest overall at nose and nasion fixation locations, an effect that might reflect most efficient holistic processing around the face center of gravity (e.g. Bindemann et al, 2009) where all facial features can be best captured.…”