Developing cultural differences in face processing

Abstract

Perception and eye movements are affected by culture. Adults from Eastern societies (e.g. China) display a disposition to process information holistically, whereas individuals from Western societies (e.g. Britain) process information analytically. Recently, this pattern of cultural differences has been extended to face processing. Adults from Eastern cultures fixate centrally towards the nose when learning and recognizing faces, whereas adults from Western societies spread fixations across the eye and mouth regions. Although light has been shed on how adults can fixate different areas yet achieve comparable recognition accuracy, the reason why such divergent strategies exist is less certain. Although some argue that culture shapes strategies across development, little direct evidence exists to support this claim. Additionally, it has long been claimed that face recognition in early childhood is largely reliant upon external rather than internal face features, yet recent studies have challenged this theory. To address these issues, we tested children aged 7-12 years of age from the UK and China with an old ⁄ new face recognition paradigm while simultaneously recording their eye movements. Both populations displayed patterns of fixations that were consistent with adults from their respective cultural groups, which 'strengthened' across development as qualified by a pattern classifier analysis. Altogether, these observations suggest that cultural forces may indeed be responsible for shaping eye movements from early childhood. Furthermore, fixations made by both cultural groups almost exclusively landed on internal face regions, suggesting that these features, and not external features, are universally used to achieve face recognition in childhood.

Can children with autism read emotions from the eyes? The Eyes Test revisited

“…In other words, these results do not support the hypothesis that a same-race bias (Kelly, Liu, Rodger, Miellet, Ge & Caldara, 2011;Vizioli, Rousselet & Caldara, 2010) may confound the results with our multi-ethnic developmental samples, using the same materials.…”

The development of face expertise: Evidence for a qualitative change in processing

“…It is thought that the progression to more sustained fixation on the diagnostic features may help the development of face processing expertise such that it becomes a more rapid and automatic process (Kelly et al, 2011) consistent with notion that face expertise involves a change in processing style and cognitive encoding , from local to holistic (Hole, 1994;Tanaka & Farah, 1993) and configural processing (Leder & Bruce, 2000).…”

“…Campbell, Walker, and Baron-Cohen (1995) has shown an external feature advantage at age 7-years that shifts to an internal feature advantage by 9-years of age. Further eye-tracking evidence supports a late development of this internal feature advantage (Kelly et al, 2011;Meaux et al, 2014;Senju, Vernetti, Kikuchi, Akechi, & Hasegawa, 2013). In addition, younger children should show more fixations with wider distribution over the features than older children and adults (Hills, Willis, & Pake, 2013).…”

“…In addition, younger children should show more fixations with wider distribution over the features than older children and adults (Hills, Willis, & Pake, 2013). Indeed, Ge et al (2008) have shown that older children tend to be able to recognise faces based on the most diagnostic features (the eyes for White faces and the nose for East Asian faces; Ge et al, 2008;Kelly et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2013). Younger children, on the other hand, rely on less diagnostic features.…”

The unfamiliar face effect on forensic craniofacial reconstruction and recognition

“…As a new paradigm that people from different cultural background achieve human face processing by focusing on different facial information has emerged, it is essential to question what aspect of culture is contributing to the process. The most plausible explanation has been provided by Nisbett and colleagues [76,77] that Westerners tend to engage analytic perceptual strategies for processing face configuration, whereas East Asians prefer holistic perceptual strategies (analytical versus holistic cultural framework) [75,78].…”