title: Facial expression training optimises viewing strategy in children and adults.
abstract: This study investigated whether training-related improvements in facial expression categorization are facilitated by spontaneous changes in gaze behaviour in adults and nine-year old children. Four sessions of a self-paced, free-viewing training task required participants to categorize happy, sad and fear expressions with varying intensities. No instructions about eye movements were given. Eye-movements were recorded in the first and fourth training session. New faces were introduced in session four to establish transfer-effects of learning. Adults focused most on the eyes in all sessions and increased expression categorization accuracy after training coincided with a strengthening of this eye-bias in gaze allocation. In children, training-related behavioural improvements coincided with an overall shift in gaze-focus towards the eyes (resulting in more adult-like gaze-distributions) and towards the mouth for happy faces in the second fixation. Gaze-distributions were not influenced by the expression intensity or by the introduction of new faces. It was proposed that training enhanced the use of a uniform, predominantly eyes-biased, gaze strategy in children in order to optimise extraction of relevant cues for discrimination between subtle facial expressions.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Petra M J
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Pollux
authors.affiliation: School of Life Science, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Sophie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hall
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Kun
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Guo
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions; D005133:Eye Movements; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult