Visual Scanning in the Recognition of Facial Affect in Traumatic Brain Injury

We investigated the visual scanning strategy employed by a group of individuals with a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) during a facial affect recognition task. Four males with a severe TBI were matched for age and gender with 4 healthy controls. Eye movements were recorded while pictures of static emotional faces were viewed (i.e., sad, happy, angry, disgusted, anxious, surprised). Groups were compared with respect to accuracy in labelling the emotional facial expression, reaction time, number and duration of fixations to internal (i.e., eyes + nose + mouth), and external (i.e., all remaining) regions of the stimulus. TBI participants demonstrated significantly reduced accuracy and increased latency in facial affect recognition. Further, they demonstrated no significant difference in the number or duration of fixations to internal versus external facial regions. Control participants, however, fixated more frequently and for longer periods of time upon internal facial features. Impaired visual scanning can contribute to inaccurate interpretation of facial expression and this can disrupt interpersonal communication. The scanning strategy demonstrated by our TBI group appears more ‘widespread’ than that employed by their normal counterparts. Further work is required to elucidate the nature of the scanning strategy used and its potential variance in TBI.