title: Mapping emotion category boundaries using a visual expectation paradigm.
abstract: Past research showing categorical perception of emotional facial expressions has relied on identification and discrimination tasks that require an explicit response via keypress. Here we report a new paradigm for investigating the category boundary of emotional facial expressions that, instead, relies on an implicit response--eye direction. Participants were trained to expect a target stimulus on a particular side of the monitor, predicted by an emotional expression on a face image. An eye-tracker then recorded eye movements of participants as they viewed novel intermediate facial-expression stimuli. Anticipatory eye movement was taken as evidence of categorisation. Results from two experiments suggest that this implicit method can be used to determine category boundaries, and that the boundaries found with this method are similar to those found with the keypress response.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4K1, Canada. chealjl@mcmaster.ca
authors.forename: Jenna L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Cheal
authors.forename: M D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Rutherford
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000145:classification*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult