ИСТИНА

Face perception is mostly holistic process. It’s proved by inversion effect: inversion of a face impairs the recognition of its identity and facial expression (Yin, 1969; McKelvie, 1995). Holistic and feature-based face processing are associated with specific strategies of eye movements (Caldara et al., 2010). Long inspection of a single feature (mainly nose) and rare fixation shifts to external facial features could be related to configural processing. Numerous fixations distributed between internal facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) could be related to feature-based processing. The current project investigates if the number of visited facial areas and the number of transitions between different features during facial expression recognition correlate with the level of the inversion effect. 92 participants (46 M, 46 F) took part in experiment. Photos of 2 male and 2 female faces from WSEFEP (Olszanowski et al., 2015 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01516) displaying seven facial expressions (neutrality, anger, fear, disgust, happiness, surprise, sadness) were presented randomly for 1300 ms each in three conditions: upright, inverted and Thatcherized inverted. The participant was to recognize facial expression. SMI RED 500 eye tracking technology was applied. Six AOIs were delimited on each face: right and left eyes, nose, mouth, “internal face” (forehead, cheeks and chin) and external features. The number of visited AOIs and the number of transitions were analyzed. The results showed great correlations between eye movement’s strategies subject used in different viewing conditions, but no correlation between the level of the inversion effect and participant’s eye movement parameters. Supported by RFBR, grant 18-013-01087А.