710036

research-article2017

CDPXXX10.1177/0963721417710036CaldaraA Flexible System for Face Processing

Culture Reveals a Flexible System forFace Processing

Current Directions in Psychological
Science2017, Vol. 26(3) 249­–255© The Author(s) 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417710036
DOI: 10.1177/0963721417710036
www.psychologicalscience.org/CDPS

Roberto Caldara
Eye and Brain Mapping Laboratory (iBMLab), Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg

Abstract
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 todetermine the effect of culture on perceptual processing. Commonalities aside, we found that Westerners distributelocal 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 themouth 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 theprocesses 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.
Keywords
face recognition, facial expressions of emotion, culture, eye movements
Humans adapt to their environment through an amalgamation of culture and biology. Indisputably, biology is
responsible for coding the salient physiognomic variations typical of populations living in different geographical locations (e.g., skin color, eye shape). Culture is anumbrella term grouping a series of environmental factors(e.g., language, practices, beliefs, norms, forms of organization) that are typical of human populations living inspecific geographical locations.
In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville reported inEtymologiae that human diversity was not limited to physical appearance but was also related to behavior and thecontent of the mind ( Jahoda, 2002). Today, isolating the
precise contributions of culture and biology with respect
to different aspects of human cognition represents a major
challenge in science, particularly given the recent mapping of the human genome. Culture shapes human behavior and cognition (Kitayama & Cohen, 2010) and has
gained increasing interest in diverse scientific fields,
including, among others, cognitive (Han & Northoff, 2008)and visual neuroscience.

The human visual system is equipped with the mostsophisticated machinery for effectively adapting to thevisual world. For more than a century, scientists havebeen fascinated by where, when, and how the eyes moveto achieve visual perception. Eye movements feed thevisual system, which actually uses only a small fraction of
the available information. A normal eye movement comprises a series of fixations and saccades. The sequencesof fixations describe the way in which overt visual attention is directed to gather diagnostic information. To date,measures of eye movements have become a method of
choice in a wide variety of disciplines investigating how
the mind achieves visual perception, and they have also
stimulated interest among my research group in thedevelopment of new data-driven statistical tools for analyzing fixation patterns inspired by brain imaging (e.g.,
Corresponding Author:
Roberto Caldara, Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg,
Faucigny 2, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland
E-mail: roberto.caldara@unifr.ch

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Caldara & Miellet, 2011; Lao, Miellet, Pernet, Sokhn, &Caldara, 2016).
However, a more important and central question guiding our work has been whether people from different
cultures explore and see the visual world in the sameway. Historically, it has long been assumed that acrosscultures, humans share most fundamental cognitive andaffective processes, perceiving the world in an essentiallycomparable manner when viewing objects and attending
to salient information. This assumption has mainly been
driven by a common fallacy in the face literature, which
has led to the arbitrary generalization of findings obtained
from the Western industrialized population (which
accounts for only 12% of the human population) to all
human beings (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).
Our work and a growing body of evidence have disputed
this notion by highlighting fundamental differences in perception between people from Eastern and Western cultures, even in important biologically relevant tasks suchas face recognition and the decoding of facial expressions of emotion.

Face Recognition
Cultural diversity has been documented across a varietyof perceptual tasks and paradigms (Nisbett & Miyamoto,2005). People from European and American cultures
focus on salient objects and use analytical rules for categorizing and organizing the environment. By contrast,
people from China, Korea, and Japan—all East Asian
cultures—focus more globally on contextual relationships and similarities among objects when organizing theenvironment. Our work has contributed to this body ofevidence by demonstrating that social experience andenvironmental factors also shape face processing.
Since the seminal work of Yarbus (1967), eye-movement studies have persistently revealed a systematic local
triangular sequence of fixations over the eyes and themouth, predominantly to the eyes, suggesting that thepresence of a face triggers a universal, biologically determined information-extraction pattern. Recently, it has
been demonstrated that this triangular fixation pattern is
an artifact caused by averaging eye-movement patterns
across individuals (Arizpe, Walsh, Yovel, & Baker, 2016;
Mehoudar, Arizpe, Baker, & Yovel, 2014). Importantly,
the recent observation that similar fixation strategies are
deployed in laboratory and ecological settings (Peterson,
Lin, Zaun, & Kanwisher, 2016) emphasizes the reliability
and robustness of observers’ eye-movement strategies.
Note, however, that the aforementioned research
involved observations made with adults from Westerncultures only. My colleagues and I controlled for culture
and used an old/new face-recognition task requiring thememorization and subsequent recognition of previously

Caldaraunfamiliar faces. Importantly, in our paradigm, we useddifferent images of Western and Eastern faces between
the encoding and recognition stages to prevent participants from using simple image-matching strategies.
Moreover, we randomized the location at which thestimuli appeared on the screen to avoid anticipatory
strategies on initial fixations. This task more closely parallels ecological constraints and requires more than thetwo fixations typical of face-matching tasks using identical stimuli between encoding and recognition, with adesign allowing anticipatory strategies (Hsiao & Cottrell,
2009; Or, Peterson, & Eckstein, 2015). Using our experimental design, we found that observers required 1.5 seconds and five saccades to achieve accurate facerecognition, and the results also replicated the wellestablished triangular fixation pattern (see Fig. 1a, left).
However, in stark contrast to adults from Western societies, individuals from Eastern cultural backgrounds predominantly adopted a global strategy, fixating more at
the center of the face (see Fig. 1a, right, and 1b; Blais,Jack, Scheepers, Fiset, & Caldara, 2008). This culturally
determined perceptual difference has been corroborated
by other research groups (e.g., Chuk, Chan, & Hsiao,
2014; Kita et al., 2010; Watanabe, Matsuda, Nishioka, &Namatame, 2011), persists with inverted faces (Rodger,
Kelly, Blais, & Caldara, 2010), and generalizes to visuallyhomogenous objects (Kelly, Miellet, & Caldara, 2010).
Interestingly, Malaysian observers living in a multiculturalsociety showed a combined strategy (Tan, Stephen,
Whitehead, & Sheppard, 2012), whereas British-born Chinese adults mostly deployed an Eastern eye-movement
strategy (Kelly, Jack, et al., 2011). Before attending school,these adults were immersed in an Eastern culture, whichsuggests that early cultural exposure played a critical rolein shaping their visual mechanisms dedicated to face processing. This hypothesis was confirmed by a series ofstudies reporting a similar cultural contrast in the fixation
patterns of Eastern (Liu et al., 2011) and Western infants(Wheeler et al., 2011), as well as 7- to 8-year-old children(Kelly, Liu, et al., 2011).
However, eye movements in natural viewing conditions
do not provide unequivocal evidence on the visual information used by observers, given that diagnostic information can be extracted without focal fixations. To address
this issue systematically, my colleagues and I used a seriesof gaze-contingent paradigms in which we restricted theavailable information by continuously updating the stimulus display as a function of the observers’ current gaze
position. Our data showed that Westerners used local
high-spatial-frequency information sampling, covering all
the features critical for effective face recognition. In contrast, Easterners achieved a similar result by using global
low-spatial-frequency information from those facial features (see Fig. 1c; Caldara, Zhou, & Miellet, 2010; Miellet,

A Flexible System for Face Processing

251

Fig. 1. Fixation patterns reflecting cultural differences in face recognition. Panel (a) shows z-scored fixation maps ofWestern Caucasian and East Asian observers, calculated independently for each face race. Panel (b) illustrates the fixation biases of Western Caucasian and East Asian observers, which have been highlighted by subtracting the Western
Caucasian and East Asian z-scored fixation distribution maps during face encoding. Areas showing a significant fixation
bias are delimited by white borders. Panel (c) reconstructs the information sampled by the eye movements using aretina filter from gaze-contingent data. Note the differences in spatial frequencies used: Westerners used local high-spatial-frequency information sampling of the eyes and the mouth, whereas Easterners used global low-spatial-frequency
information from those features. Panel (b) is adapted from Figure 2 of “Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces,” by C.
Blais, R. E. Jack, C. Scheepers, D. Fiset, and R. Caldara, 2008, PLoS ONE, 3(8), e3022. Copyright 2008 by the authors.
Panel (c) was adapted from Figure 5 of “Mapping Face Recognition Information Use Across Cultures,” by S. Miellet,
L. Vizioli, L. He, X. Zhou, and R. Caldara, 2013, Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article 34. Copyright 2013 by the authors.

He, Zhou, Lao, & Caldara, 2012; Miellet, Vizioli, He, Zhou,& Caldara, 2013). This observation was recently corroborated by a psychophysical study showing that during facerecognition, Eastern observers showed a greater tuning
toward coarse facial features than did Western observers,
despite having comparable visual sensitivity in distinguishing between increasingly finer increments of light versus
dark (Tardif et al., 2016).
These differences across cultures accord with findings
from a series of studies reporting reliable differences

between individuals in their average fixation patterns(Arizpe et al., 2016; Kanan, Bseiso, Ray, Hsiao, & Cottrell,
2015; Mehoudar et al., 2014) and strategies, which alternated from local to global during the recognition of thevery same identity, even within the same Western observers (Miellet, Caldara, & Schyns, 2011). The location of thefirst fixation, and more specifically its distance from theeyes, seems to critically determine the exhibited perceptual strategy (Arizpe, Kravitz, Yovel, & Baker, 2012; Miellet
et al., 2011).

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CaldaraAltogether, our data show that the face system flexibly
engages in culturally modulated eye-movement strategies
by relying on distinct facial information. Given that bothWestern and Eastern observers achieve face recognition
with comparable efficiency despite sampling different
information, these observations challenge the widely
accepted view of a mandatory, universal process for facerecognition, whether configural or holistic.

Facial Expressions of Emotion
Central to the regulation of human social interactions is themutual understanding of emotion. This is primarily achievedby the communication of a set of potent signals: facial
expressions of emotion. With biological and evolutionary
origins, the basic facial expressions of emotions (i.e., happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness) have long
been considered universal. In the past years, however, myresearch group has challenged this widely held assumption
by investigating whether the decoding of emotional signals
is achieved universally across human beings.
In a first study, we monitored the eye movements ofWestern and Eastern observers while they were recognizing facial expressions of Western and Eastern faces (seeFig. 2a; Jack, Blais, Scheepers, Schyns, & Caldara, 2009).
Whereas Westerners sampled all facial features to perform
this task, Easterners persistently fixated the eye region
more than the mouth and experienced significantly
greater confusion in emotion decoding (e.g., between fearand surprise or anger and disgust). By using reverse correlation techniques, we then demonstrated that the information used to transmit and decode emotional signals
differed between Western and Eastern adults ( Jack,
Caldara, & Schyns, 2012; Jack, Garrod, Yu, Caldara, &Schyns, 2012). Specifically, the mouth was more informative for transmitting emotional signals in Westerners, andthe eye region was more informative for transmitting
emotional signals in Easterners, with cultural accents­(Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003) emerging at the later stagesof the facial-expression dynamics ( Jack, Garrod, & Schyns,2014). This difference resonates with the use of emoticons
across cultures, whereby Easterners code transitions ofexpressions from happy to sad with the eyes and Westerners do so with the mouth (see Fig. 2b; Yuki, Maddux, &Masuda, 2007). Finally, my collaborators and I recently
reported that such cultural differences are already present
in 7-month-old infants (see Fig. 2c; Geangu et al., 2016).
Altogether, these findings demonstrate that from an earlystage in life, culture shapes the development of perceptual
strategies used to process facial expressions of emotion.

Conclusions and Future Directions
We and others have shown that from an early stage inlife, culture shapes the eye-movement strategies deployed

Fig. 2. Fixation patterns and emoticons reflecting cultural differencesin emotion-expression recognition and transmission, respectively. Panel(a) shows Western Caucasian and East Asian fixation distributions averaged across the six basic emotion expressions (happiness, surprise,fear, disgust, anger, and sadness) plus a neutral expression (Jack, Blais,
Scheepers, Schyns, & Caldara, 2009). Note that Eastern observers did
not fixate the mouth even for the happy expression. Panel (b) illustrates the distinctly different emoticons used by each culture to convey expressions of emotion (here, happy and sad, respectively), whichaccord with these observations. Panel (c) shows a similar pattern offixation distributions observed in Western Caucasian and East Asian
7-month-old infants (Geangu et al., 2016). Panel (a) is adapted from
Figure 1a of “Cultural Confusions Show That Facial Expressions Are
Not Universal,” by R. E. Jack, C. Blais, C. Scheepers, P. G. Schyns,
and R. Caldara, 2009, Current Biology, 19, p. 1544. Copyright 2009by Elsevier. Panel (c) is adapted from “Culture Shapes 7-month-olds’
Perceptual Strategies in Discriminating Facial Expressions of Emotion,”by E. Geangu, H. Ichikawa, J. Lao, S. Kanazawa, M. K. Yamaguchi, R.
Caldara, and C. Turati, 2016, Current Biology, 26, p. R663. Copyright2016 by Elsevier.

by humans to recognize identities and facial expressionsof emotion. The face system relies on culture-specificstrategies, such that observers have idiosyncratic preferences (Arizpe et al., 2016; Kanan, Bseiso, Ray, Hsiao, &Cottrell, 2015; Mehoudar et al., 2014), which can flexibly
shift from one strategy to another as a function of task
constraints and the landing of the first fixation location(Miellet et al., 2011). These observations do not only
emphasize the need to acknowledge and understand
individual differences in visual (neuro)science; importantly, they also call into question the existence of universal mechanisms for face processing. Interestingly,
these fine-grained perceptual cultural contrasts resonate

A Flexible System for Face Processing
with and find confirmation in cross-cultural macrosocietal
observations. The results for face recognition offer
an empirical explanation for culturally stereotypicalfacial-identity descriptions offered for other-race faces.
Westerners describe Easterners as having “slanted eyes,”
whereas Easterners describe Westerners as having “bignoses”—referring to precisely the facial features that aresampled comparatively more within the respective cultures. The facial features sampled more during the recognition of expressions of emotion are also mirrored inculture-dependent differences between emoticons (seeFig. 2b).
Despite the solidity of the observations outlined here,
the cultural roots and the neural bases determining theseperceptual differences are still unclear. The social normof not directly gazing at the eyes typical of Eastern cultures cannot straightforwardly account for the results inface recognition, since the central fixation bias persists
for visually homogenous non-face objects (Kelly et al.,2010). It is worth noting that this central fixation bias is
not present anymore during the decoding of facial
expressions, because this task requires direct fixations
toward the eye region for the accurate categorization of
the conveyed emotions. In addition, Easterners are culturally encouraged to suppress their emotions. Given thatthe muscles of the mouth are easier to control than thoseof the eyes, Easterners might focus more on the eyes todecode more subtle expressions from this face region.
Future studies are necessary to clarify whether these twosocial norms learned early in life are directly responsible
for shaping the perceptual strategies observed in adults.
Regardless of those potential explanations, further studies are also necessary to test additional cultures and to relate
observed eye-movement differences to those obtained inother visual tasks (e.g., Miellet, Zhou, He, Rodger, & Caldara,2010), as well as to test the fine-grained contribution of
attention in our observations with more appropriate task
designs (e.g., change-blindness paradigms, binocular
rivalry). It also remains to be clarified whether these cultural
perceptual strategies can be abolished through holistic or
analytical cognitive priming and whether the organizationof societies (i.e., collectivistic vs. individualistic) is responsible for these perceptual biases. It is also necessary tounderstand whether such preferential cultural fixationbiases can be accounted for by differences in diagnostic
facial information across races. This would require the useof large 3D face databases in order to clarify whether eye
movements deployed for processing same- or other-racefaces are (or are not) at the core of the other-race effect(e.g., Caldara & Abdi, 2006), a well-known impairment inface recognition that we have observed exclusively at the
behavioral level in our eye-movement studies. Further, it iswell established that language shapes cognition, and it

253
remains to be determined whether and how language
could also shape such cultural perceptual strategies. Finally,
the most crucial question that remains to be addressed iswhether the differences reported by my lab so far are genuinely related to culture or related to genes, a factor thathas been confounded in the large majority of cross-cultural
studies. This limitation can be addressed only by testing
adoptees raised in another culture.
Importantly, regardless of these open questions, themarked behavioral diversity across human beings outlined here forces us to reconsider the very nature of perception and the determinants that shape the way we see
the world. In the words of Anaïs Nin, “We do not see
things as they are, we see them as we are” (1961, p. 124).
Recommended Reading
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). (See References).
A provocative and influential review claiming that most of
the theories in behavioral sciences are limited because they
are based on a subsample of the human population, withparticipants drawn from WEIRD (i.e., Western, educated,industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies only.
Kitayama, S., & Cohen, D. (2010). (See References). A bookcovering and reviewing the history of and the most important findings in cultural psychology.
Nisbett, R. E., & Miyamoto, Y. (2005). (See References). A comprehensive review on the role of culture in visual and cognitive perceptual processes.

Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to all the collaborators who contributed tothis research agenda.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to theauthorship or the publication of this article.

Funding
This work was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation Grant IZLJZ1_171065/1, awarded to Roberto Caldara.

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