Culture Reveals a Flexible System for Face Processing

The human face transmits a wealth of signals that readily provide crucial information for social interactions, such as facial identity and emotional expression. Nonetheless, a fundamental question remains debated: Is face processing governed by universal perceptual processes? It has long been presumed that this is the case. However, over the past decade, our work at the Eye and Brain Mapping Laboratory has called into question this widely held assumption. We have investigated the eye movements of Western and Eastern observers across various face-processing tasks to determine the effect of culture on perceptual processing. Commonalities aside, we found that Westerners distribute local fixations across the eye and mouth regions, whereas Easterners preferentially deploy central, global fixations during face recognition. Moreover, during the recognition of facial expressions of emotion, Westerners fixate the mouth relatively more to discriminate across expressions, whereas Easterners favor the eye region. Both observations demonstrate that the face system relies on different strategies to perform a range of socially relevant face-processing tasks with comparable levels of efficiency. Overall, these cultural perceptual biases challenge the view that the processes dedicated to face processing are universal, favoring instead the existence of distinct, flexible strategies. The way humans perceive the world and process faces is determined by experience and environmental factors.