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Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features

Duran, Nazire; Atkinson, Anthony P.

Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features Thumbnail


Authors

Nazire Duran



Abstract

Certain facial features provide useful information for recognition of facial expressions. In two experiments, we investigated whether foveating informative features of briefly presented expressions improves recognition accuracy and whether these features are targeted reflexively when not foveated. Angry, fearful, surprised, and sad or disgusted expressions were presented briefly at locations which would ensure foveation of specific features. Foveating the mouth of fearful, surprised and disgusted expressions improved emotion recognition compared to foveating an eye or cheek or the central brow. Foveating the brow led to equivocal results in anger recognition across the two experiments, which might be due to the different combination of emotions used. There was no consistent evidence suggesting that reflexive first saccades targeted emotion-relevant features; instead, they targeted the closest feature to initial fixation. In a third experiment, angry, fearful, surprised and disgusted expressions were presented for 5 seconds. Duration of task-related fixations in the eyes, brow, nose and mouth regions was modulated by the presented expression. Moreover, longer fixation at the mouth positively correlated with anger and disgust accuracy both when these expressions were freely viewed (Experiment 2b) and when briefly presented at the mouth (Experiment 2a). Finally, an overall preference to fixate the mouth across all expressions correlated positively with anger and disgust accuracy. These findings suggest that foveal processing of informative features is functional/contributory to emotion recognition, but they are not automatically sought out when not foveated, and that facial emotion recognition performance is related to idiosyncratic gaze behaviour.

Citation

Duran, N., & Atkinson, A. P. (2021). Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features. PLoS ONE, 16(12), Article e0260814. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260814

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 23, 2021
Online Publication Date Dec 2, 2021
Publication Date 2021
Deposit Date Dec 3, 2021
Publicly Available Date Dec 3, 2021
Journal PLoS ONE
Electronic ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 16
Issue 12
Article Number e0260814
DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260814
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1220190
Related Public URLs https://psyarxiv.com/f3nzy/

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Published Journal Article (3.1 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2021 Duran, Atkinson. This is an
open access article distributed under the terms of
the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.






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