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11 pages, 790 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Exploring the Role of Foveal and Extrafoveal Processing in Emotion Recognition: A Gaze-Contingent Study

by Alejandro J. Estudillo

Behav. Sci. 2025, 15(2), 135; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15020135 - 26 Jan 2025

Viewed by 861

Although the eye-tracking technique has been widely used to passively study emotion recognition, no studies have utilised this technique to actively manipulate eye-gaze strategies during the recognition facial emotions. The present study aims to fill this gap by employing a gaze-contingent paradigm. Observers were asked to determine the emotion displayed by centrally presented upright or inverted faces. Under the window condition, only a single fixated facial feature was available at a time, only allowing for foveal processing. Under the mask condition, the fixated facial feature was masked while the rest of the face remained visible, thereby disrupting foveal processing but allowing for extrafoveal processing. These conditions were compared with a full-view condition. The results revealed that while both foveal and extrafoveal information typically contribute to emotion identification, at a standard conversation distance, the latter alone generally suffices for efficient emotion identification. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Understanding Facial Expression Processing: New Methods, Measures and Models)

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14 pages, 10125 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Mixed Statistical and Machine Learning Approach for the Analysis of Multimodal Trail Making Test Data

by Niccolò Pancino, Caterina Graziani, Veronica Lachi, Maria Lucia Sampoli, Emanuel Ștefǎnescu, Monica Bianchini and Giovanna Maria Dimitri

Mathematics 2021, 9(24), 3159; https://doi.org/10.3390/math9243159 - 8 Dec 2021

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 3748

Abstract

Eye-tracking can offer a novel clinical practice and a non-invasive tool to detect neuropathological syndromes. In this paper, we show some analysis on data obtained from the visual sequential search test. Indeed, such a test can be used to evaluate the capacity of looking at objects in a specific order, and its successful execution requires the optimization of the perceptual resources of foveal and extrafoveal vision. The main objective of this work is to detect if some patterns can be found within the data, to discern among people with chronic pain, extrapyramidal patients and healthy controls. We employed statistical tests to evaluate differences among groups, considering three novel indicators: blinking rate, average blinking duration and maximum pupil size variation. Additionally, to divide the three patient groups based on scan-path images—which appear very noisy and all similar to each other—we applied deep learning techniques to embed them into a larger transformed space. We then applied a clustering approach to correctly detect and classify the three cohorts. Preliminary experiments show promising results. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Mathematical Modelling and Machine Learning Methods for Bioinformatics and Data Science Applications)

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12 pages, 708 KiB

Open AccessArticle

When East Meets West: Gaze-Contingent Blindspots Abolish Cultural Diversity in Eye Movements for Faces

by Sébastien Miellet, Lingnan He, Xinyue Zhou, Junpeng Lao and Roberto Caldara

J. Eye Mov. Res. 2012, 5(2), 1-12; https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.5.2.5 - 8 May 2012

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 160

Abstract

Culture impacts on how people sample visual information for face processing. Westerners deploy fixations towards the eyes and the mouth to achieve face recognition. In contrast, Easterners reach equal performance by deploying more central fixations, suggesting an effective extrafoveal information use. However, this hypothesis has not been yet directly investigated, i.e., by providing only extrafoveal information to both groups of observers. We used a parametric gaze-contingent technique dynamically masking central vision—the Blindspot—with Western and Eastern observers during face recognition. Westerners shifted progressively towards the typical Eastern central fixation pattern with larger Blindspots, whereas Easterners were insensitive to the Blindspots. These observations clearly show that Easterners preferentially sample information extrafoveally for faces. Conversely, the Western data also show that culturally-dependent visuo-motor strategies can flexibly adjust to constrained visual situations. Full article

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