Culture shapes how we look at faces

Caroline Blais, Rachael E. Jack, Christoph Scheepers, Daniel Fiset, Roberto Caldara

POLS One 3(8):e3022

Face processing, among many basic visual skills, is thought to be invariant across humans. From as early as 1965, studies of eye movements have consistently revealed a systematic triangular sequence of fixation over the eyes and the mouth, suggesting that faces elicit a universal, biologically-determined information extraction pattern. Here we monitored the eye movements of Western Caucasian and East Asian observers while they learned, recognized, and categorized by race Western Caucasian and East Asian faces. Western Caucasian observers reproduced a scattered triangular pattern of fixations for faces and both races and across tasks. Contrary to intuition, East Asian observed focused more on the central region of the faces. These results demonstrate that face processing can no longer be considered as arising from a universal series of perceptual events. The strategy employed to extract visual information from faces differs across cultures.