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Abstract:
The other-race effect is the widely known difficulty at recognizing faces of another race. Further, it has been clearly established in eye tracking studies that observers of different cultural background exhibit different viewing strategies. Whether those viewing strategies depend also on the type of faces shown (same-race vs. other-race faces) is under much debate. Using eye tracking, we investigated whether European observers look at different facial features when viewing Asian and Caucasian faces in a face race categorization task. Additionally, to investigate the influence of viewpoints on gaze patterns, we presented faces in frontal, half profile and profile views. Even though fixation patterns generally changed across views, fixations to the eyes were more frequent for Caucasian faces and fixations to the nose were more frequent for Asian faces, independent of face orientation. In contrast, how fixations to cheeks, mouth and outline regions changed according to the face's race was also dependent on face orientations. In sum, our results indicate that we mainly look at prominent facial features, albeit which features are fixated most often critically depends on face race and orientation.
