Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces

By C. Blais, Rachael E. Jack, Christoph Scheepers, D. Fiset, Roberto Caldara. PLoS ONE, 2008

599 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Face processing, amongst many basic visual skills, is thought to be invariant across all humans. From as early as 1965, studies of eye movements have consistently revealed a systematic triangular sequence of fixations over the eyes and the mouth, suggesting that faces elicit a universal, biologically-determined information extraction pattern. Methodology/Principal Findings 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 of both races and across tasks. Contrary to intuition, East Asian observers focused more on the central region of the face. Conclusions/Significance 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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98844c17c22a93e7a6b40a06433427b7be8f68e2

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Citations in the corpus

Perceptions as Hypotheses: Saccades as Experiments (2012, background): “In the same vein, a central fixation bias has been established for Eastern observers (Blais et al., 2008; Miellet et al., 2010).”
Development of the other-race effect during infancy: Evidence toward universality? (2009, background): “In addition, understanding which aspects of face processing are subject to cultural influence, as reported in adults (Blais et al., 2008), and which aspects are resistant represents a major obstacle, but one that offers to transform our understanding of face processing.”
Face scanning in chimpanzees and humans: continuity and discontinuity (2010, background): “Similarly, previous studies in humans have revealed that East Asians tend to look at the eye regions for shorter durations than Caucasians when presented with photographs of East Asian and Caucasian faces (Blais et al. 2008).”
Learning visual biases from human imagination (2014, background): “This effect is likely attributed to phenomena in social psychology where human perception can be influenced by culture [7, 5].”
Neural bases of eye and gaze processing: the core of social cognition. (2009, unknown): “While the Caucasians fixated more on the internal features of faces and especially on the eyes (Section 2), the East Asian participants tended to look in the center of the faces (Blais et al., 2008).”