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Modulations of eye movement patterns by spatial filtering during the learning and testing phases of an old/new face recognition task

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Abstract

In two experiments, we examined the effects of varying the spatial frequency (SF) content of face images on eye movements during the learning and testing phases of an old/new recognition task. At both learning and testing, participants were presented with face stimuli band-pass filtered to 11 different SF bands, as well as an unfiltered baseline condition. We found that eye movements varied significantly as a function of SF. Specifically, the frequency of transitions between facial features showed a band-pass pattern, with more transitions for middle-band faces (≈5–20 cycles/face) than for low-band (≈<5 cpf) or high-band (≈>20 cpf) ones. These findings were similar for the learning and testing phases. The distributions of transitions across facial features were similar for the middle-band, high-band, and unfiltered faces, showing a concentration on the eyes and mouth; conversely, low-band faces elicited mostly transitions involving the nose and nasion. The eye movement patterns elicited by low, middle, and high bands are similar to those previous researchers have suggested reflect holistic, configural, and featural processing, respectively. More generally, our results are compatible with the hypotheses that eye movements are functional, and that the visual system makes flexible use of visuospatial information in face processing. Finally, our finding that only middle spatial frequencies yielded the same number and distribution of fixations as unfiltered faces adds more evidence to the idea that these frequencies are especially important for face recognition, and reveals a possible mediator for the superior performance that they elicit.

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Notes

  1. We note that we obtained substantively similar results when examining nonnormalized dwell times. As well, we found broadly similar results when normalizing the dwell times according to the luminance or contrast of the AOIs. For the sake of brevity, these analyses are not included in this article.

  2. It should be noted that this interpretation is dependent on one’s quantitative definition of a saccade (and therefore a transition). Our eyetracking device could only register saccades that were at least 0.5 deg in magnitude. Thus, we cannot rule out the possibility that, for instance, the drop in transition frequencies at high spatial frequencies was in fact a shift toward more microsaccades.

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This research project was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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  1. School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N6N5, Canada

    Chantal L. Lemieux, Charles A. Collin & Elizabeth A. Nelson

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  1. Chantal L. Lemieux
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  2. Charles A. Collin
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  3. Elizabeth A. Nelson
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Correspondence to Chantal L. Lemieux.

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Lemieux, C.L., Collin, C.A. & Nelson, E.A. Modulations of eye movement patterns by spatial filtering during the learning and testing phases of an old/new face recognition task. Atten Percept Psychophys 77, 536–550 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-014-0778-0

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