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Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features

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. A...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Duran, Nazire, Atkinson, Anthony P.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8638924/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34855898
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260814
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author Duran, Nazire
Atkinson, Anthony P.
author_facet Duran, Nazire
Atkinson, Anthony P.
author_sort Duran, Nazire
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-86389242021-12-03 Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features Duran, Nazire Atkinson, Anthony P. PLoS One Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2021-12-02 /pmc/articles/PMC8638924/ /pubmed/34855898 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260814 Text en © 2021 Duran, Atkinson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Duran, Nazire
Atkinson, Anthony P.
Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features
title Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features
title_full Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features
title_fullStr Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features
title_full_unstemmed Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features
title_short Foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features
title_sort foveal processing of emotion-informative facial features
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8638924/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34855898
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260814
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