Culture Shapes Face Processing

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Caroline Blais and Roberto Caldara
Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience and Global Mental Health
Edited by Joan Y. Chiao, Shu-Chen Li, Robert Turner, Su Yeon Lee-Tauler, and Beverly A. Pringle
Print Publication Date: Dec 2021 Subject: Psychology, Clinical Psychology
Online Publication Date: Mar 2022 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190057695.013.16

Abstract and Keywords
Cross-cultural studies have revealed striking differences in visual perception. Recent re­search has shown that even processes that have long been assumed to be universal, suchas face processing, are in part shaped by the cultural environment in which one hasgrown up. This chapter gives an overview of the main findings with regard to the impactof culture on the visual processes involved in face identification and facial expression
recognition. The chapter also discusses neurological conditions affecting face perception
and how culture may interact with these conditions to modulate visual perception.
Keywords: culture, face recognition, facial expressions, visual perception, eye movements, psychophysics

Introduction
As with globalization multiculturalism increases in our contemporary societies, we areconfronted with the ethical responsibility of developing a health system that should ideal­
ly take into account all sorts of variations across human beings. Some of these individual
differences are obvious. For instance, it is well established that gender influences the re­sponse to some medications (e.g., Bergiannaki & Kostaras, 2016; Ohlsen & Pilowsky,2007). Culture and ethnicity also play a critical role in modulating health issues (e.g.,
Yuan et al., 2005). However, what is much less obvious is the impact of culture on how in­dividuals perceive their world, and how this may affect not only their approach to health(e.g., Gupta, 2010), pain (e.g., Edwards et al., 2001; Hsieh et al., 2010) and the health sys­
tem in general (e.g., Pavlish et al., 2010; Sheikh & Furnham, 2000), but also the effective­
ness and appropriateness of the treatments they receive (Fiscella et al., 2000).
Research in psychology has revealed that one’s perception of the world is deeply influ­
enced by cultural learning. Evidence of cultural influences span from complex, high-level
psychological processes, such as how one interprets someone else’s behavior (Choi et al.,
1999; Morris & Peng, 1994) or makes important life decisions (Levine et al., 1995), to ba­
sic perceptual processes, such as the visual information on which one relies to process
faces (Blais et al., 2008; Caldara et al., 2010; Tardif et al., 2017; for a review see Caldara,
Page 1 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing(p. 310) 2017), objects (Gutchess et al., 2006; Kelly et al., 2010; Paige et al., 2017), or sim­ple visual arrays (Ueda et al., 2018).
With regard to face perception, research has so far focused on characterizing the culturaldifferences in the behavior and brain processes of normal individuals. However, deficits
of face perception are observed in many neurological conditions, and how culture inter­acts with these conditions to modulate visual perception remains unknown. The present
chapter will first provide an overview of the research on cultural differences in visual per­ception in general, and face perception in particular, as well as the potential sources forthese differences. Then we will review some neurological conditions affecting face pro­cessing for which knowledge gathered so far suggests that treatments may benefit frombeing tailored to the individual’s culture.

Cultural Differences in Visual Perception
The last few decades of research have led to evidence supporting the idea that the samevisual stimulation is not perceived in the same way by all observers; in particular, culture
has been shown to deeply affect visual processes (Caldara, 2017; Chen & Jack, 2017; Nis­
bett et al., 2001). A large part of the studies assessing the impact of culture on visual per­ception has compared individuals from East Asia (mainly from China, South Korea andJapan) with Westerners. This may be explained by a methodological issue: to assess theuniversality of a process, it is necessary to compare very different populations with re­gard to culture while controlling for the level of education, because the latter may affectthe interpretation of instructions (Heine, 2015). Easterners and Westerners adhere tovery different systems of values (Hofstede, 1991; Nisbett et al., 2001) but have similarsystems of education. Thus, the present chapter will mostly focus on face processing stud­ies comparing Easterners and Westerners, research in other populations is still cruelly
lacking.
The cultural differences highlighted so far in visual perception may be grouped aroundthree main categories of findings: (a) when processing a visual scene, Easterners attend
to the context/background more than Westerners, and Westerners attend more to the fo­
cal objects of the scene than Easterners (Chua et al., 2005; Masuda et al., 2008; Masuda& Nisbett, 2001; but see Miellet et al., 2010); (b) Easterners process visual stimulations
in a more global manner than Westerners (McKone et al., 2010; Nisbett & Miyamoto,2005); and (c) Easterners deploy their visual attention over a larger area of their visual
field than Westerners (Boduroglu et al., 2009; Boduroglu & Shah, 2017; Miellet et al.,2013; Tardif et al., 2017).

Attention to Context Versus Focal Objects
A seminal study by Masuda and Nisbett (2001) has revealed that when asked to describe
a visual scene, Easterners describe more of the background than Westerners. Most inter­estingly, when presented with focal objects of the previously viewed scenes, the ability ofEasterners to remember these objects depended on the background on which (p. 311) they
Page 2 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
were presented. More specifically, their performance dropped when the objects were pre­sented over a new background. Crucially, this drop in performance was not observed forWesterner observers. The authors of that study concluded that Easterners encode focal
objects in memory by binding them to the context in which they were perceived, whereas
Westerners encode objects in memory separately from their context.
This conclusion was later extended by showing that not only memory-encoding processes
are affected by culture, but also the final percept per se (Masuda et al., 2008). In fact,
when Easterners have to judge the facial expression of a focal individual surrounded byother expressive individuals, their affective evaluation is more affected by the expressionof the surrounding individuals than the Westerners. Interestingly, only ocular fixations oc­
curring later than 1 second after stimulus onset differed in both cultural groups, which
led the authors to conclude that the differences observed reflected late decisional
processes rather than early perceptual processes. However, the ocular fixation pattern
was averaged over 1-second periods, which decreased the temporal resolution of the re­sults. In contrast, a study assessing the ocular fixations of Easterners and Westerners
while they viewed natural visual scenes revealed cultural differences as early as 420 ms(Chua et al., 2005). Moreover, as will be discussed in more detail in the section “Cultural
Differences in Face Identification”, eye movements alone do not provide a complete pic­
ture of visual information processing. In fact, differences in late ocular fixation patterns
may reflect earlier differences in covert attention (Estéphan et al., 2018; Tardif et al.,2017). Thus, the processing stage at which the background affects the foreground per­ception in Easterners is worth further investigation.
A higher tendency for Easterners than for Westerners to bind the background with focal
objects was also observed with simpler visual stimulation. For instance, in the Rod andFrame test (Witkin et al., 1954), in which one has to judge the orientation of a“rod” (depicted as a line) independently of the frame (depicted as a square) in which itappears, Easterners are more affected than Westerners by the frame’s orientation (Ji etal., 2000). In a similar vein, Easterners show more difficulty at inhibiting the context in
the absolute version of the Frame-Line test (Kitayama et al., 2003; but see Zhou et al.,2008). The absolute version of that test consists in adjusting the length of a line inside asquare such that it is of equal length with a previously viewed line appearing inside asquare of different size. To perform accurately in such a task, one needs to process theline independently from the square in which it appears. Thus, evidence so far suggeststhat Easterners and Westerners differ in the degree to which they attend to the context ofa visual scene and integrate this context with the objects it contains. Further evidence forsuch cultural perceptual bias has been recently found for a famous visual search problem
parametrically varying in difficulty: Where’s Waldo (Lüthold et al., 2018). East Asian ob­
servers were significantly much more impaired than Western Caucasian observers forfinding Waldo, despite all observers having a comparable level of familiarity with the vi­
gnettes. Interestingly, Easterners showed a peculiar and systematic eye movement(p. 312) strategy consisting in returning more often to previously visited locations com­pared to Westerners. This suboptimal eye movement strategy in the Easterners mightarise from their perceptual bias in using more extra-foveal information, which impaired
Page 3 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
the visual search for Waldo. Overall, this subtle perceptual difference shows that the pro­cessing of active visual search in scenes is modulated by the culture of the observer.

Global Versus Local Processing of Information
In addition to the differences observed in the processing of relations between objects andthe context in which they appear, some have proposed that Easterners and Westerners
differ in the degree to which they rely on global versus local processes. Using hierarchi­
cal letters (i.e., large letters composed of smaller ones, for instance, large H composed ofsmall Es), it was shown that Easterners show a larger global advantage than Westerners(McKone et al., 2010). With hierarchical letters, a global advantage consists in being bet­
ter at detecting a target letter when it is displayed as the large (global) letter than when
it is displayed as the small (local) letters composing it. Using electrophysiology, Lao et al.
(2013) showed that the higher tuning toward global than local information occurred inearlier processing stages for Easterners than for Westerners. Adding further support to
the idea that Easterners process information in a more global manner than Westerners, it
was also shown that they have a stronger tendency than Westerners at perceiving a facein Arcimboldo paintings (paintings depicting faces composed of objects such as fruits orvegetables; Rozin et al., 2016).
Nevertheless, not all studies assessing cultural differences on global versus local percep­
tual bias have found a larger global bias for Easterners than Westerners. In the aforemen­tioned study by Lao and colleagues, although they found cultural differences in brain ac­
tivity, they did not replicate the finding of a larger global advantage for Easterners thanWesterners at the behavioral level. Another study using similar stimuli (hierarchical geo­
metrical shapes) but a different task (visual similarity judgments instead of a target de­tection) obtained a larger global bias for British than for Japanese individuals (Oishi et al.,2014). Thus, although many studies point toward cultural differences in the global or lo­
cal perceptual bias, findings are not systematic across studies. Note, however, that a
study has shown that hierarchical letters and hierarchical shapes tap into different as­pects of global/local processes (Dale & Arnell, 2013), which may explain the discrepan­cies observed across the studies described previously.

Breadth of Attentional Deployment
The third category of findings suggests that Easterners deploy their visual attention overa broader area of their visual field than Westerners. For instance, in a change detectiontask, Easterners have been shown to perform better than Westerners when the changes
occur in more peripheral locations, whereas Westerners perform best when the changes
occur in more central locations (Boduroglu et al., 2009). Moreover, it was recently shown(p. 313) that the spatial resolution with which Easterners process a simple visual scene islower than that of Westerners (Boduroglu & Shah, 2017), a finding that would be expect­
ed following a broader allocation of attention (Balz & Hock, 1997; Goto et al., 2001). In
fact, the findings of a global perceptual bias and of a broader deployment of attention byEasterners and Westerners may represent the same perceptual mechanism: it was shown
Page 4 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processingthat attending to the global versus local structure of an object affects the resolution withwhich it is processed (Shulman & Wilson, 1987). More specifically, attending to the global
structure, which usually spans a larger area of the visual field, facilitates the processingof lower spatial frequencies, which code for coarser visual information. In contrast, at­tending to the local structure, which usually spans a smaller area of the visual field, facili­tates the processing of higher spatial frequencies, which code for finer visual information.
Cultural differences in the visual processing of objects have recently been supported bybrain-level analyses: simple objects involve distinct multivoxel representations in the visu­
al cortex of Easterners and Westerners (Ksander et al., 2018). Most interestingly, the au­thors of that study reported supplemental analysis suggesting that these distinct repre­
sentations may be associated with the processing of distinct spatial frequencies (i.e., low­er spatial frequencies for Easterners than Westerners). This finding coincides very wellwith the finding of cultural differences in the spatial frequencies used during face pro­cessing (Estéphan et al., 2018; Tardif et al., 2017), which will be described in more detailin the section “Cultural Differences in Face Identification”.

Attentional Processes and System of Values
The findings of a different use of the relation between objects and their context, of differ­ent perceptual biases, and of different attentional breadth have for the most part been re­lated to a dominant theory in the field proposing that exposition to an individualistic ver­sus collectivistic system of values led to the development of different perceptual strate­
gies (Nisbett et al., 2001). More specifically, according to this theory, exposition to collec­
tivistic values prioritizing the group over the individual would shape cognitive and per­ceptual processes such that one tends to attend more to the relation between events andobjects and deploy their attention across a broader area of the visual field. In contrast,
exposition to individualistic values, prioritizing the individual over the group, would
shape cognitive and perceptual processes such that one tends to attend more to focal ob­
jects located in a specific/local area of their visual field.
Another account that has recently gained support by studies measuring the global versus
local perceptual bias in a remote African population, the Himba (Caparos et al., 2012; Lin­
nell et al., 2013), proposes that many of the findings described earlier are attributable to
the kind of physical environment to which one is exposed (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006).
More specifically, exposition to a dense visual environment would lead to perceptual
strategies favoring the processing of the background and the deployment of attention
over broader areas, thus facilitating a global perceptual bias. The fact that Easterners
show a (p. 314) larger global perceptual bias than Westerners, who themselves show alarger global perceptual bias than traditional Himba people, is congruent with the visual
density to which each of these populations is exposed (Caparos et al., 2012).
Although more work is necessary to understand the source of cultural differences high­lighted previously, evidence so far reveals a relatively systematic pattern of findings
whereby culture modulates the way in which attention is deployed over the visual field.

Page 5 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
As will be described in the next section, this pattern of findings has also been observed inface perception studies.

Cultural Differences in Face Identification
In 2008, we published the first study revealing cultural differences in the visual strate­
gies underlying face processing (Blais et al., 2008). We revealed that when encoding or
recognizing the identity of a face and when categorizing the ethnicity of a face, Eastern­ers and Westerners displayed different eye fixation patterns. Easterners fixated more thecentral area of a face than Westerners, whereas Westerners fixated more the eye andmouth areas than Easterners. Interestingly, these different eye fixation patterns were de­ployed despite the fact that the same facial areas, namely the eyes and the mouth, wereused by both groups. In fact, the latter conclusion was reached in a following study where
Caldara et al. (2010) used a gaze-contingent paradigm in which the size of the window
through which the stimulus was visible was manipulated. When the size of the window
was reduced, Easterners adopted a fixation pattern similar to that of Westerners, where­by they directly fixated the eye and mouth areas. Thus, this suggested that Easterners,
just like Westerners, rely on the eye and mouth areas to recognize faces. However, West­erners spend more time than Easterners foveating these areas during visual information
extraction. In contrast, Easterners spend more time than Westerners processing these ar­
eas in more peripheral locations of their retina. Interestingly, when using an inverse para­
metric gaze-contingent technique consisting in dynamically masking central vision – theBlindspot – Westerners progressively shifted the eye movements towards the typical East­ern central fixation pattern (Miellet, et al, 2012). This later observation confirmed the ro­bustness of a fixation bias in a focal (i.e., Western) versus peripheral (i.e., Eastern) visual
information sampling across cultures.
The different patterns of eye fixations during face processing corroborate well the find­ings described previously, consisting in a more global/larger attentional breadth in East­
erners than Westerners. In fact, to process the features of a face while fixating on a more
central location, one has to deploy their attention more broadly. Accordingly, Miellet et al.
(2013) developed a computational model to estimate the breadth of attention in Eastern­ers and Westerners during face processing and to estimate the resolution, in terms of spa­tial frequencies, with which they process visual information. Based on their model, they
proposed that Easterners’ attentional breadth is larger than Westerners’, and that the for­mer rely less than the latter on higher spatial frequencies. Also consistent with (p. 315)
the reliance on a more global perceptual strategy, at least two studies have found a high­er reliance on holistic/configural processing during face processing (Miyamoto et al.,2011; Rozin et al., 2016).
Nevertheless, the conclusion of different visual strategies and of a reliance on different
granularities of visual information in Easterners and Westerners was challenged in astudy by Or et al. (2015). These authors did not find cultural differences in early ocular
fixations during face processing. Yet, early fixations have been shown to be sufficient forPage 6 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
face recognition (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2008), thereby leading to questioning of whether thecultural differences observed in later ocular fixations are truly associated with face pro­cessing per se. In fact, Or and colleagues proposed that they most likely reflected normbased cultural differences in the appropriateness of fixating someone else in the eyes, in­stead of differences in the perceptual strategies per se. However, this view has been chal­lenged by the eye movement strategy deployed during the recognition of the facial ex­pressions of emotion. East Asian observers deploy more fixations toward the eye region
than toward the mouth region to decode facial expressions; this contrasts with the West­
ern Caucasians’ strategy whereby the fixations are evenly distributed on the eyes andmouth area (Geangu et al., 2016; Jack et al., 2009; see section “Cultural Differences in Fa­cial Expression Processing”). Therefore, East Asian observers directly gaze at the eyes
when this is task relevant. Social gaze avoidance as a potential explanation for the cultur­
al contrast in face recognition also is not supported by the persistent central fixations di­rected toward nonface objects (i.e., Greebles) and nonhuman faces (i.e., sheep faces) byEasterners during recognition (Kelly et al., 2010). Or et al. (2015) study involved a facematching task, while all our previous study used an old/new face recognition task. In ad­
dition, the methodological peculiarities adopted in the eye movement experiment con­ducted by Or et al. (2015) elicited the use of only a few fixations and did not prevent for
anticipatory strategies. As such, those factors and differences across studies seem to beat the root of the absence of cultural differences observed in their study.
Further supporting the idea that culture impacts early processes in face identification,
two recent studies have shown cultural differences in low-level visual information extrac­
tion occurring at early processing stages (Estéphan et al., 2018; Tardif et al., 2017). Morespecifically, using spatial frequency Bubbles (Willenbockel et al., 2010), a psychophysicalclassification image method, Tardif et al. (2017) showed that during two different faceprocessing tasks (face identification and face familiarity), Easterners use more of the low­er spatial frequencies than Westerners, and Westerners used more of the higher spatial
frequencies than Easterners. This pattern of results was replicated by Estéphan and col­leagues, who further showed that the reliance on different spatial frequencies by both
cultural groups started as early as 35 ms after stimulus onset. This makes very unlikely
the conclusion that Easterners and Westerners differ only in late perceptual stages re­flecting cultural norms in the appropriateness of looking someone else in the eye. More­over, the pattern of spatial frequency utilization closely reflects what was expected basedon the (p. 316) eye fixation pattern (i.e., when not considering the temporal dimension).
Thus, this may indicate that even later ocular fixations reflect cultural differences in early
covert attention.
So far, the source of these cultural differences in face processing remains unknown. The
pattern, since it suggests a larger attentional breadth in Easterners than in Westerners, isconsistent with both of the accounts mentioned in the section “Attentional Processes andSystem of Values”. In fact, the theory proposing that exposure to different systems of val­
ues may shape perceptual processes predicts a larger attentional breadth in Easterners,
who are exposed to more collectivistic values, than in Westerners, who are exposed tomore individualistic values. A study by Kelly et al. (2011) has attempted to verify if the
Page 7 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
eye movement pattern of British-born Chinese was correlated with the degree to which
they adhere to collectivistic values and failed to reveal a significant relation. The sample
size was, however, relatively small, so the relation between visual strategies and adher­
ence to collectivistic or individualistic values remains worth investigating.
Similarly, the theory proposing that exposure to dense visual environments leads to theadoption of a larger attentional breadth and a global perceptual bias is also consistent
with the pattern of findings obtained in face processing. Testing a rural African popula­tion would help disambiguate between the two potential explanations. In fact, as ex­
plained earlier, traditional Himba people have been shown to be more local than British
and Japanese individuals in two visual processing tasks that did not involve face stimuli(Caparos et al., 2012). In contrast, the system-of-values theory would have predicted alarger global bias for Himba than for British people, as the former adhere to more collec­
tivistic values than the latter. Thus, although the system-of-values theory would predict apattern of ocular fixations and a spatial frequency tuning closer to the one observed with
Easterners in rural African populations, the visual environment hypothesis would predictrather a higher reliance on high spatial frequency and denser ocular fixations on the main
facial features in rural Africans than in Westerners.
Another possibility is that the pattern of findings observed with faces reflects a different
mechanism than the one underlying the findings in visual tasks involving nonsocial stim­
uli. In fact, Han and Ma (2014) have shown that different neural networks are associatedwith cultural differences during the processing of social and nonsocial visual stimuli. Per­
haps one potential explanation lies in the frequency of exposure to face stimuli during
early infancy and the preferred distance at which infants view faces across cultures. It
was recently shown that Western infants younger than 3 months have front-view faces intheir visual field almost three times more often than toddlers of 18 months (Jayaraman etal., 2017). Moreover, this high exposure to faces during young infancy is crucial for thedevelopment of face-processing mechanisms. In fact, young infants deprived of such ex­
posure because of congenital cataracts show deficits in configural face processing evenafter having the cataracts removed and having been exposed to faces for many years (LeGrand et al., 2001). Nevertheless, although cultural differences in the frequency of faceto-face interactions have been observed (Keller, 2007), cultural differences in the develop­
mental (p. 317) trajectory of this phenomenon have not been investigated so far. Most im­
portantly, the distance at which infants from different cultures view faces most frequently
may affect the degree to which they learn to rely on lower versus higher spatial frequen­cies. In fact, as the distance increases between someone’s eyes and the face to beprocessed, the availability of higher spatial frequencies decreases (F. W. Smith & Schyns,2009). Interestingly, a study comparing infant–mother interactions in Japan and the Unit­
ed States has shown that during face-to-face interactions, American mothers stand closer
to their child (Fogel et al., 1988). This finding may be consistent with the Westerners tun­
ing toward higher spatial frequencies. In any case, a systematic investigation of the fre­quency and distance at which infants of different cultures are exposed to faces may rep­

Page 8 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
resent an interesting avenue for understanding the findings described in the present
chapter with faces.

Cultural Differences in Facial Expression Pro­
cessing
The field of emotion studies has witnessed a long-standing debate regarding the univer­
sality or cultural specificity of facial expressions of emotion and their recognition. The
seminal work of Ekman and colleagues (Ekman et al., 1969; Ekman & Friesen, 1971) has
argued in favor of the universality of a subset of emotions, called basic emotions (i.e.,anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). A large part of the argument was
first based on the discovery that a remote, isolated culture in New Guinea had the capaci­ty to recognize, with a performance higher than chance, the emotions expressed by North
Americans (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). The reverse was also true—that is, North Americans
displayed a performance higher than chance at recognizing facial expressions displayed
by Papua individuals. Thus, the authors suggested that enough signal was shared among
the North Americans’ and Papuasians’ expressions to conclude that they were biologicallydetermined and universal.
However, despite being able to recognize the expressions emitted by the other culture,both groups were impaired in comparison with their performance at recognizing theirown-group expressions. In fact, a meta-analysis revealed a systematic impairment, acrossstudies, at recognizing facial expressions of basic emotions when they are emitted by an­other cultural group than the observer (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). Interestingly, such an
impairment can even be observed when observers come from a different region, but fromthe same country, than the emitter (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). Although an impairment
at recognizing other-group expressions does not preclude the possibility that these ex­pressions are universal, it suggests that culture at least nuances their appearance.
Revealing those nuances, however, is not trivial. For instance, one method consists in cap­turing spontaneous expressions in emotion-inducing situations. Using such a method, it isdifficult to make sure that the situation used to induce emotions is interpreted in thesame way across cultures and effectively induces the same emotion across cultures. An
alternative to this method has been proposed in a series of studies using reverse correla­tion (Jack, Caldara, & Schyns, 2012; Jack, Garrod, et al., 2012; Jack et al., 2016). The(p. 318) traditional version of the reverse correlation method (Ahumada & Lovell, 1971;
Eckstein & Ahumada, 2002; Mangini & Biederman, 2004) consists in embedding a stimu­
lus in visual noise, such that the noise alters the stimulus appearance. On each trial, thenoise is different, therefore changing the stimulus’s appearance, and the participants are
asked to make a decision about the stimulus presented. For instance, the noise proper­
ties, when added over a neutral face, may create stimuli that appear closer to someone’s
representation of anger, sadness, disgust, etc. After many such trials, it is possible to in­
fer which noise properties led the participant to perceive each of these expressions; themethod thus allows accessing the participant’s mental representation of each expression.
Page 9 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Using that method, Jack, Caldara, and Schyns (2012) showed that Easterners and West­erners build different representations of facial expressions of basic emotions. In fact,
whereas expressions of Westerners include facial features located around the mouth, eye,and eyebrow areas, expressions of Easterners are mostly represented by changes in theeye area.
Building on this work, Jack and colleagues (2016) used a method developed by Yu et al.
(2012) that combines dynamic structural face computer graphics with reverse correlation
to extract the facial movements (i.e., more specifically, the Facial Action Units, based on
Ekman and colleagues’ work; Ekman & Friesen, 1978) representative of each facial ex­pression of emotion in Chinese and British participants. In a very elegant study, they mod­eled over 60 culturally valid expressions of emotions in these two cultures and showedthat they share four different patterns of facial movements. Based on these results, theysuggested the existence of four, rather than six, emotions shared across cultures. More­over, they showed that these basic patterns are nuanced by what they called “accents”
and that those accents differed across cultures (for a similar proposition, see also Elfen­
bein, 2013). The observation, on the one hand, of cultural commonalities, and, on the oth­er hand, of cultural accents to facial expressions was further supported by a recent study
using a completely different method (Cordaro et al., 2018).
Slight differences in the appearance of facial expressions, like the ones observed acrosscultures, are likely to be associated with the development of different visual strategies
during decoding. However, although many studies have investigated the visual strategies
used by Westerners to recognize facial expressions of emotions (e.g., Adolphs et al., 2005;
Blais et al., 2012, 2017; Calvo et al., 2014; Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011; M. L. Smith et al.,2005), only a few have investigated if and how these strategies are modulated by culture(Jack et al., 2009; Mai et al., 2011). Jack and colleagues (2009) have shown that when cat­egorizing the six basic facial expressions of emotions, Westerners’ ocular fixations aremostly directed on the mouth and eye areas, whereas Easterners fixate mostly the eyearea. This finding was congruent with those described earlier, showing that Easterners
mostly represent the six basic facial expressions using variations in the eye area, whereas
Westerners represent the basic expressions using featural variations in the eye, eyebrow,
and mouth areas (Jack, Caldara, & Schyns, 2012). Consistently with these results, a study
showed that the Chinese participants who perform better in a fake smile detection task
are (p. 319) the ones who rely the most on the eye area (Mai et al., 2011). Although thesestudies are informative with regard to the areas typically fixated by Easterners and West­erners, more research is needed to compare different cultures on their utilization of lowlevel visual information, for instance, spatial frequencies, during facial expression recog­
nition. More recently, Geangu et al. (2016) reported that such cultural differences are al­
ready present in 7-month-old infants. Altogether, these findings demonstrate that from anearly stage in life, culture shapes the visual sampling strategies used to decode facial ex­pressions of emotion.

Page 10 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing

Future Directions
As pointed out in the introduction, deficits at processing faces are observed in many neu­
rological conditions or mental health disorders. For instance, impairments in recognizing
facial expressions are observed in autism (Baron‐Cohen et al., 2001; Humphreys et al.,2007; Wallace et al., 2008), schizophrenia (Kohler et al., 2009; Mandal et al., 1998), andsocial anxiety (Montagne et al., 2006). Moreover, profound impairments in processing theidentity of a face are found in congenital (Behrmann & Avidan, 2005; Duchaine, 2000)
and acquired (Rossion, 2014) prosopagnosia, conditions that are actually defined by that
deficit. Several studies have looked into the visual strategies that may be associated withthese perceptual deficits. However, whether culture interacts with these conditions in de­termining the type of visual strategies used during face perception remains unknown.
Interestingly, research has shown that certain genes interact with culture such that re­verse behaviors may be observed in individuals with a similar genetic predisposition but
different cultures (Kim & Sasaki, 2014). For instance, Kim et al. (2009) investigated thelink between a serotonin receptor gene and the locus of attention, namely whether indi­viduals reported paying more attention to focal objects or to the background of a scene.
They found that the same genotype (homozygous on the G allele of the 5-HTR1A gene)
was associated with inverse strategies as a function of culture: while Westerners with thisgenotype reported paying more attention to focal objects than to the background, East­
erners with the same genotype instead reported paying more attention to the backgroundthan to focal objects. This finding is fascinating, as it suggests that individuals with simi­
lar biological constitutions may develop different perceptual strategies because of theway they might react and adapt to cultural forces. It also raises the question of whether
similar neurological conditions may be associated with different perceptual deficits. In
fact, on the one hand, cultural forces may interact with similar neurological alterations tocreate different behavioral manifestations. On the other hand, the studies presented inthis chapter highlight striking differences in the visual perception of normal individuals ofdifferent cultures. Thus, it is highly plausible that an acquired neurological condition,such as prosopagnosia following a cerebral lesion, as well as developmental conditions,such as congenital prosopagnosia or autism, will be associated with different visualstrategies in different cultures.
(p. 320) Take, for instance, the case of prosopagnosia. This condition has been associated,in Westerner populations, with an alteration at fixating (de Xivry et al., 2008) and pro­cessing (Bukach et al., 2008; Caldara et al., 2005) the eye area during the recognition offace identities. Moreover, it has been suggested that this condition is associated with asmaller perceptual window (Van Belle et al., 2015). No study has so far verified the visualstrategies used by non-Western populations suffering from this condition. As explained in
the section “Cultural Differences in Face Identification”, during face recognition, Eastern­ers fixate less the eye area, deploy their attention more broadly, and are tuned toward
lower spatial frequencies than Westerners. What would be the functional consequence ofa lesion leading to prosopagnosia in Easterners? Since they already make few fixations to
the eye area because of their larger attentional breadth, would prosopagnosia lead toPage 11 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processingchanges in fixations to the eye area? Would it be associated with a change in the spatial
frequency tuning? Similarly, prosopagnosia is associated, in Westerners, with a deficit inrecognizing facial expressions of emotion (Bowers et al., 1985; De Gelder et al., 2000)
and with a decrease in the ocular fixations directed to the eye area, as well as a de­creased processing of the visual information conveyed by that area (Fiset et al., 2017). As
explained in the section “Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions Processing”, Eastern­ers rely mostly on the eye area during emotion categorization, making few fixations to themouth area, compared with Westerners. Thus, would Easterner prosopagnosics be evenmore impaired than Westerner prosopagnosics at recognizing emotions? Would they show
the same impairment in processing the eye area? Similar questions may be raised with re­gard to autism. In fact, Western individuals with autism have been shown to fixate (Spezio
et al., 2007a) and process (Spezio et al., 2007b) less information conveyed by the eye
area during the processing of faces (both identity and expressions). Since Easterners use
this information less during the processing of identity but rely mostly on that information
during the processing of emotion, would the same differences in perceptual strategies be­
tween neurotypical and autistic individuals be observed in East Asia?

Conclusion
In recent years, an important trend in research on face processing has been to character­ize as precisely as possible the visual strategies underlying this biological skill, as well as
the ones underlying deficits in this ability, to gather the necessary information to developinterventions that may help improve face-processing abilities (Caldara et al., 2005; Fiset
et al., 2017; Nusseck et al., 2008; Peterson & Eckstein, 2012; Richoz et al., 2015; Royer etal., 2018; M. L. Smith et al., 2005; Tardif et al., 2019; Yovel & Duchaine, 2006). Cross-cul­tural studies have revealed striking differences in the visual strategies underlying theprocessing of faces, but the evolutionary, social, and biological forces rooting such effects
are not well understood. In addition, as pointed out by Kitayama and Salvador (2017), we
acknowledge that the field needs to expand the span of populations compared and when­ever possible study other cultures. The question of whether the cultural differences(p. 321) reported here are genuinely related to culture or related to other environmental
or biological forces remains to be validated, as these factors have been confounded in thelarge majority of cross-cultural studies.
Finally, whether and how these strategies are altered in different neurological and mental
health conditions in non-Western populations remains unknown. Such knowledge, cou­
pled with functional neuroimaging studies in the healthy population, will be very impor­tant to gather in the next years to develop interventions that are adapted to the culture,and thus to the nature of the visual deficit, of the patients.

Page 12 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing

References
Adolphs, R., Gosselin, F., Buchanan, T. W., Tranel, D., Schyns, P., & Damasio, A. R. (2005).
A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage. Nature, 433(7021),
68.
Ahumada Jr., A., & Lovell, J. (1971). Stimulus features in signal detection. Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, 49(6B), 1751–1756.
Balz, G. W., & Hock, H. S. (1997). The effect of attentional spread on spatial resolution. Vi­sion Research, 37(11), 1499–1510.
Baron‐Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “Reading theMind in the Eyes” test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with As­
perger syndrome or high‐functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry,42(2), 241–251.
Behrmann, M., & Avidan, G. (2005). Congenital prosopagnosia: Face-blind from birth.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 180–187.
Bergiannaki, J. D., & Kostaras, P. (2016). Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic effectsof psychotropic medications: Differences between sexes. Psychiatriki, 27(2), 118–126.
Blais, C., Fiset, D., Roy, C., Saumure Régimbald, C., & Gosselin, F. (2017). Eye fixation
patterns for categorizing static and dynamic facial expressions. Emotion, 17(7), 1107.
Blais, C., Jack, R. E., Scheepers, C., Fiset, D., & Caldara, R. (2008). Culture shapes how
we look at faces. PloS One, 3(8), e3022.
Blais, C., Roy, C., Fiset, D., Arguin, M., & Gosselin, F. (2012). The eyes are not the window
to basic emotions. Neuropsychologia, 50(12), 2830–2838.
Boduroglu, A., & Shah, P. (2017). Cultural differences in attentional breadth and resolu­
tion. Culture and Brain, 5(2), 169–181.
Boduroglu, A., Shah, P., & Nisbett, R. E. (2009). Cultural differences in allocation of atten­
tion in visual information processing. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(3), 349–
360.
Bowers, D., Bauer, R. M., Coslett, H. B., & Heilman, K. M. (1985). Processing of faces by
patients with unilateral hemisphere lesions: I. Dissociation between judgments of facial
affect and facial identity. Brain and Cognition, 4(3), 258–272.
Bukach, C. M., Le Grand, R., Kaiser, M. D., Bub, D. N., & Tanaka, J. W. (2008). Preserva­
tion of mouth region processing in two cases of prosopagnosia. Journal of Neuropsycholo­gy, 2(1), 227–244.

Page 13 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Caldara, R. (2017). Culture reveals a flexible system for face processing. Current Direc­
tions in Psychological Science, 26(3), 249–255.
Caldara, R., Schyns, P., Mayer, E., Smith, M. L., Gosselin, F., & Rossion, B. (2005). Does
prosopagnosia take the eyes out of face representations? Evidence for a defect in repre­
senting diagnostic facial information following brain damage. Journal of Cognitive Neuro­science, 17(10), 1652–1666.
Caldara, R., Zhou, X., & Miellet, S. (2010). Putting culture under the ‘spotlight’ reveals
universal information use for face recognition. PLoS One, 5(3), e9708.
Calvo, M. G., Fernández-Martín, A., & Nummenmaa, L. (2014). Facial expression recogni­tion in peripheral versus central vision: Role of the eyes and the mouth. Psychological Re­
search, 78(2), 180–195.
Caparos, S., Ahmed, L., Bremner, A. J., de Fockert, J. W., Linnell, K. J., & Davidoff, J.
(2012). Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture. Cogni­tion, 122(1), 80–85.
Chen, C., & Jack, R. E. (2017). Discovering cultural differences (and similarities) in facial
expressions of emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 61–66.
(p. 322) Choi, I., Nisbett, R. E., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). Causal attribution across cul­tures: Variation and universality. Psychological Bulletin, 125(1), 47.
Chua, H. F., Boland, J. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (2005). Cultural variation in eye movements
during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(35),12629–12633.
Cordaro, D. T., Sun, R., Keltner, D., Kamble, S., Huddar, N., & McNeil, G. (2018). Univer­sals and cultural variations in 22 emotional expressions across five cultures. Emotion,
18(1), 75–93.
Dale, G., & Arnell, K. M. (2013). Investigating the stability of and relationships among
global/local processing measures. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 75(3), 394–
406.
De Gelder, B., Pourtois, G., Vroomen, J., & Bachoud-Lévi, A. C. (2000). Covert processingof faces in prosopagnosia is restricted to facial expressions: Evidence from cross-modalbias. Brain and Cognition, 44(3), 425–444.
de Xivry, J. J. O., Ramon, M., Lefèvre, P., & Rossion, B. (2008). Reduced fixation on the up­
per area of personally familiar faces following acquired prosopagnosia. Journal of Neu­
ropsychology, 2(1), 245–268.
Duchaine, B. C. (2000). Developmental prosopagnosia with normal configural processing.
Neuroreport, 11(1), 79–83.

Page 14 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Eckstein, M. P., & Ahumada, A. J. (2002). Classification images: A tool to analyze visualstrategies. Journal of Vision, 2(1), doi: https://doi.org/10.1167/2.1.i.
Edwards, C. L., Fillingim, R. B., & Keefe, F. (2001). Race, ethnicity and pain. Pain, 94(2),133–137.
Eisenbarth, H., & Alpers, G. W. (2011). Happy mouth and sad eyes: Scanning emotional
facial expressions. Emotion, 11(4), 860.
Ekman, P., Sorenson, E. R., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). Pan-cultural elements in facial dis­
plays of emotion. Science, 164(3875), 86–88.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), 124.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1978). Facial action coding system: Investigator’s guide. Con­sulting Psychologists Press.
Elfenbein, H. A. (2013). Nonverbal dialects and accents in facial expressions of emotion.
Emotion Review, 5(1), 90–96.
Elfenbein, H. A., & Ambady, N. (2002). On the universality and cultural specificity of emo­tion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 128(2), 203.
Estéphan, A., Fiset, D., Saumure, C., Plouffe-Demers, M. P., Zhang, Y., Sun, D., & Blais, C.
(2018). Time course of cultural differences in spatial frequency use for face identification.
Scientific Reports, 8(1), 1816.
Fiscella, K., Franks, P., Gold, M. R., & Clancy, C. M. (2000). Inequality in quality: Address­
ing socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic disparities in health care. Jama, 283(19), 2579–
2584.
Fiset, D., Blais, C., Royer, J., Richoz, A. R., Dugas, G., & Caldara, R. (2017). Mapping theimpairment in decoding static facial expressions of emotion in prosopagnosia. Social Cog­
nitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(8), 1334–1341.
Fogel, A., Toda, S., & Kawai, M. (1988). Mother-infant face-to-face interaction in Japanand the United States: A laboratory comparison using 3-month-old infants. Developmental
Psychology, 24(3), 398.
Geangu, E., Ichikawa, H., Lao, J., Kanazawa, S., Yamaguchi, M. K., Caldara, R., & Turati,
C. (2016). Culture shapes 7-month-olds’ perceptual strategies in discriminating facial ex­pressions of emotion. Current Biology, 26(14), R663–R664.
Goto, M., Toriu, T., & Tanahashi, J. I. (2001). Effect of size of attended area on contrast
sensitivity function. Vision Research, 41(12), 1483–1487.
Gupta, V. B. (2010). Impact of culture on healthcare seeking behavior of Asian Indians.
Journal of Cultural Diversity, 17(1), 13–19.
Page 15 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Gutchess, A. H., Welsh, R. C., Boduroĝlu, A., & Park, D. C. (2006). Cultural differences inneural function associated with object processing. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neu­
roscience, 6(2), 102–109.
Han, S., & Ma, Y. (2014). Cultural differences in human brain activity: A quantitative
meta-analysis. NeuroImage, 99, 293–300.
Heine, S. J. (2015). Cultural psychology (3rd International Student ed.). WW Norton &Company.
Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and organizations: Intercultural cooperation and its impor­tance for survival: Software of the mind. McGraw-Hill.
Hsiao, J. H. W., & Cottrell, G. (2008). Two fixations suffice in face recognition. Psychologi­
cal Science, 19(10), 998–1006.
(p. 323) Hsieh, A. Y., Tripp, D. A., Ji, L. J., & Sullivan, M. J. (2010). Comparisons of cata­strophizing, pain attitudes, and cold-pressor pain experience between Chinese and Euro­pean Canadian young adults. Journal of Pain, 11(11), 1187–1194.
Humphreys, K., Minshew, N., Leonard, G. L., & Behrmann, M. (2007). A fine-grained
analysis of facial expression processing in high-functioning adults with autism. Neuropsy­
chologia, 45(4), 685–695.
Jack, R. E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R. (2009). Cultural confu­
sions show that facial expressions are not universal. Current Biology, 19(18), 1543–1548.
Jack, R. E., Caldara, R., & Schyns, P. G. (2012). Internal representations reveal cultural di­versity in expectations of facial expressions of emotion. Journal of Experimental Psycholo­
gy: General, 141(1), 19.
Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G., Yu, H., Caldara, R., & Schyns, P. G. (2012). Facial expressions ofemotion are not culturally universal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,109(19), 7241–7244.
Jack, R. E., Sun, W., Delis, I., Garrod, O. G., & Schyns, P. G. (2016). Four not six: Revealing
culturally common facial expressions of emotion. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, 145(6), 708.
Jayaraman, S., Fausey, C. M., & Smith, L. B. (2017). Why are faces denser in the visual ex­periences of younger than older infants?. Developmental Psychology, 53(1), 38.
Ji, L. J., Peng, K., & Nisbett, R. E. (2000). Culture, control, and perception of relationships
in the environment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(5), 943.
Keller, H. (2007). Cultures of infancy. Erlbaum.

Page 16 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Kelly, D. J., Jack, R. E., Miellet, S., De Luca, E., Foreman, K., & Caldara, R. (2011). Social
experience does not abolish cultural diversity in eye movements. Frontiers in Psychology,
2, 95.
Kelly, D. J., Miellet, S., & Caldara, R. (2010). Culture shapes eye movements for visuallyhomogeneous objects. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 6.
Kim, H. S., & Sasaki, J. Y. (2014). Cultural neuroscience: Biology of the mind in culturalcontexts. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 487–514.
Kim, H. S., Sherman, D. K., Taylor, S. E., Sasaki, J. Y., Chu, T. Q., Ryu, C., Suh, E. M., & Xu,
J. (2009). Culture, serotonin receptor polymorphism and locus of attention. Social Cogni­
tive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(2–3), 212–218.
Kitayama, S., Duffy, S., Kawamura, T., & Larsen, J. T. (2003). Perceiving an object and its
context in different cultures: A cultural look at new look. Psychological Science, 14(3),201–206.
Kitayama, S., & Salvador, C. E. (2017). Culture embrained: Going beyond the nature-nur­
ture dichotomy. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(5), 841–854.
Kohler, C. G., Walker, J. B., Martin, E. A., Healey, K. M., & Moberg, P. J. (2009). Facial emo­tion perception in schizophrenia: A meta-analytic review. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 36(5),1009–1019.
Ksander, J. C., Paige, L. E., Johndro, H. A., & Gutchess, A. H. (2018). Cultural specializa­tion of visual cortex. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 13(7), 709–718.
Lao, J., Vizioli, L., & Caldara, R. (2013). Culture modulates the temporal dynamics of glob­
al/local processing. Culture and Brain, 1(2–4), 158–174.
Le Grand, R., Mondloch, C. J., Maurer, D., & Brent, H. P. (2001). Neuroperception: Early
visual experience and face processing. Nature, 410(6831), 890.
Levine, R., Sato, S., Hashimoto, T., & Verma, J. (1995). Love and marriage in eleven cul­tures. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, 26, 554–571.
Linnell, K. J., Caparos, S., de Fockert, J. W., & Davidoff, J. (2013). Urbanization decreases
attentional engagement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Per­
formance, 39(5), 1232.
Lüthold, P., Lao, J., He, L., Zhou, X., & Caldara, R. (2018). Waldo reveals cultural differ­ences in return fixations. Visual Cognition, 26(10), 817–830.
Mai, X., Ge, Y., Tao, L., Tang, H., Liu, C., & Luo, Y. J. (2011). Eyes are windows to the Chi­nese soul: Evidence from the detection of real and fake smiles. PloS One, 6(5), e19903.
Mandal, M. K., Pandey, R., & Prasad, A. B. (1998). Facial expressions of emotions andschizophrenia: A review. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 24(3), 399–412.
Page 17 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Mangini, M. C., & Biederman, I. (2004). Making the ineffable explicit: Estimating the in­formation employed for face classifications. Cognitive Science, 28(2), 209–226.
Masuda, T., Ellsworth, P. C., Mesquita, B., Leu, J., Tanida, S., & Van de Veerdonk, E.
(2008). Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emo­tion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(3), 365.
(p. 324) Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2001). Attending holistically versus analytically:

Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology, 81(5), 922.
Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2006). Culture and change blindness. Cognitive Science,30(2), 381–399.
McKone, E., Davies, A. A., Fernando, D., Aalders, R., Leung, H., Wickramariyaratne, T., &Platow, M. J. (2010). Asia has the global advantage: Race and visual attention. Vision Re­
search, 50(16), 1540–1549.
Miellet, S., Zhou, X., He, L., Rodger, H., & Caldara, R. (2010). Investigating cultural diver­sity for extrafoveal information use in visual scenes. Journal of Vision. 10(6), 1–18.
Miellet, S., He, L., Zhou, X., Lao, J. & Caldara, R. (2012). When East meets West: gazecontingent Blindspots abolish cultural diversity in eye movements for faces. Journal of
Eye Movement Research, 5(2), 1–12.
Miellet, S., Vizioli, L., He, L., Zhou, X., & Caldara, R. (2013). Mapping face recognition in­formation use across cultures. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 34.
Miyamoto, Y., Yoshikawa, S., & Kitayama, S. (2011). Feature and configuration in faceprocessing: Japanese are more configural than Americans. Cognitive Science, 35(3), 563–
574.
Montagne, B., Schutters, S., Westenberg, H. G., van Honk, J., Kessels, R. P., & de Haan, E.
H. (2006). Reduced sensitivity in the recognition of anger and disgust in social anxiety
disorder. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 11(4), 389–401.
Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions
for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 949.
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems ofthought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108(2), 291.
Nisbett, R. E., & Miyamoto, Y. (2005). The influence of culture: Holistic versus analytic
perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(10), 467–473.
Nusseck, M., Cunningham, D. W., Wallraven, C., & Bülthoff, H. H. (2008). The contribu­
tion of different facial regions to the recognition of conversational expressions. Journal of
Vision, 8(8), doi: https://doi.org/10.1167/8.8.1
Page 18 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Ohlsen, R. I., & Pilowsky, L. S. (2007). Gender and psychopharmacology. In M. Nasser, K.
Baistow, & J. Treasure (Eds.), The female body in mind: The interface between the female
body and mental health (pp. 238–252). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Oishi, S., Jaswal, V. K., Lillard, A. S., Mizokawa, A., Hitokoto, H., & Tsutsui, Y. (2014). Cul­
tural variations in global versus local processing: A developmental perspective. Develop­
mental Psychology, 50(12), 2654.
Or, C. C. F., Peterson, M. F., & Eckstein, M. P. (2015). Initial eye movements during face
identification are optimal and similar across cultures. Journal of Vision, 15(13). doi:
https://doi.org/10.1167/15.13.12
Paige, L. E., Ksander, J. C., Johndro, H. A., & Gutchess, A. H. (2017). Cross-cultural differ­ences in the neural correlates of specific and general recognition. Cortex, 91, 250–261.
Pavlish, C. L., Noor, S., & Brandt, J. (2010). Somali immigrant women and the American
health care system: Discordant beliefs, divergent expectations, and silent worries. Social
Science & Medicine, 71(2), 353–361.
Peterson, M. F., & Eckstein, M. P. (2012). Looking just below the eyes is optimal acrossface recognition tasks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(48),E3314–E3323.
Richoz, A. R., Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R. (2015). Reconstruct­
ing dynamic mental models of facial expressions in prosopagnosia reveals distinct repre­
sentations for identity and expression. Cortex, 65, 50–64.
Rossion, B. (2014). Understanding face perception by means of prosopagnosia and neu­roimaging. Frontiers in Bioscience (Elite Edition), 6, 308–317.
Royer, J., Blais, C., Charbonneau, I., Déry, K., Tardif, J., Duchaine, B., Gosselin, F., & Fiset,
D. (2018). Greater reliance on the eye region predicts better face recognition ability. Cog­
nition, 181, 12–20.
Rozin, P., Moscovitch, M., & Imada, S. (2016). Right: Left: East: West. Evidence that indi­viduals from East Asian and South Asian cultures emphasize right hemisphere functions
in comparison to Euro-American cultures. Neuropsychologia, 90, 3–11.
Sheikh, S., & Furnham, A. (2000). A cross-cultural study of mental health beliefs and atti­
tudes towards seeking professional help. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology,
35(7), 326–334.
Shulman, G. L., & Wilson, J. (1987). Spatial frequency and selective attention to local andglobal information. Perception, 16(1), 89–101.
Smith, F. W., & Schyns, P. G. (2009). Smile through your fear and sadness: Transmitting
and identifying facial expression signals over a range of viewing distances. Psychological
Science, 20(10), 1202–1208.
Page 19 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing(p. 325) Smith, M. L., Cottrell, G. W., Gosselin, F., & Schyns, P. G. (2005). Transmitting anddecoding facial expressions. Psychological Science, 16(3), 184–189.
Spezio, M. L., Adolphs, R., Hurley, R. S., & Piven, J. (2007a). Analysis of face gaze inautism using “Bubbles.” Neuropsychologia, 45(1), 144–151.
Spezio, M. L., Adolphs, R., Hurley, R. S., & Piven, J. (2007b). Abnormal use of facial infor­
mation in high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37(5),929–939.
Tardif, J., Fiset, D., Zhang, Y., Estéphan, A., Cai, Q., Luo, C., Sun, D., Gosselin, F., & Blais,
C. (2017). Culture shapes spatial frequency tuning for face identification. Journal of Ex­
perimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(2), 294.
Tardif, J., Morin-Duchesne, X., Cohan, S., Royer, J., Blais, C., Fiset, D., Duchaine, B., &Gosselin, F. (2019). Use of face information varies systematically from developmental
prosopagnosics to super-recognizers. Psychological Science, 30(2), 300–308.
Ueda, Y., Chen, L., Kopecky, J., Cramer, E. S., Rensink, R. A., Meyer, D. E., Kitayama, S., &Saiki, J. (2018). Cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures. Cognitive
Science, 42(1), 286–310.
Van Belle, G., Lefèvre, P., & Rossion, B. (2015). Face inversion and acquired prosopag­
nosia reduce the size of the perceptual field of view. Cognition, 136, 403–408.
Wallace, S., Coleman, M., & Bailey, A. (2008). An investigation of basic facial expression
recognition in autism spectrum disorders. Cognition and Emotion, 22(7), 1353–1380.
Willenbockel, V., Fiset, D., Chauvin, A., Blais, C., Arguin, M., Tanaka, J. W., Bub, D. N., &Gosselin, F. (2010). Does face inversion change spatial frequency tuning? Journal of Ex­
perimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36(1), 122.
Witkin, H. A., Lewis, H. B., Hertzman, M., Machover, K., Meissner, P. B., & Wapner, S.
(1954). Personality through perception: An experimental and clinical study. Harper.
Yovel, G., & Duchaine, B. (2006). Specialized face perception mechanisms extract bothpart and spacing information: Evidence from developmental prosopagnosia. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience, 18(4), 580–593.
Yu, H., Garrod, O. G., & Schyns, P. G. (2012). Perception-driven facial expression synthe­
sis. Computers & Graphics, 36(3), 152–162.
Yuan, H. Y., Chen, J. J., Lee, M. M., Wung, J. C., Chen, Y. F., Charng, M. J., Lu, M. J., Hung,
C. R., Wei, C. Y., Chen, C. H., Wu, J. Y., & Chen, Y. T. (2005). A novel functional VKORC1
promoter polymorphism is associated with inter-individual and inter-ethnic differences in
warfarin sensitivity. Human Molecular Genetics, 14(13), 1745–1751.

Page 20 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022

Culture Shapes Face Processing
Zhou, J., Gotch, C., Zhou, Y., & Liu, Z. (2008). Perceiving an object in its context—Is thecontext cultural or perceptual? Journal of Vision, 8(12), doi:https://doi.org/
10.1167/8.12.2.

Caroline Blais

Caroline Blais, Department of Psychology, University of Quebec in Outaouais, Que­bec, Canada, Canada
Roberto Caldara

Roberto Caldara, Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg,
Switzerland, Switzerland

Page 21 of 21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 22 March 2022