成人与幼儿面部表情注意偏好的眼动研究

Visual Preference of Facial Expressions in Children and Adults: Evidence from Eye Movements

本研究选取45名3-5岁幼儿和39名大学本科生作为被试。实验材料为恐惧、愤怒、悲伤、惊讶和高兴五种面部表情图片。用Tobbi眼动仪记录被试观察表情图片时的眼动轨迹。结果发现:(1)成人偏好高兴表情,并在高兴表情上的注视时间和次数显著大于幼儿;(2)成人偏好注视眼部,幼儿偏好注视嘴部。结果表明,面部表情注意偏好的发展具有社会依存性,趋向于偏好积极情绪,这种发展变化与面部表情部位的注意偏好相关。

The human face is among the most important visual stimuli for people of all ages, the importance of which partly stems from the face as a conveyer of information on the emotional states of other individuals. Previous studies have verified that anger or fear tends to be more attractive than neutral ones. These studies suggest that the visual preference of the facial expressions support the threat de tection theory. On the other hand, recent findings show that positive faces, rather than the threat related ones, are more efficiently de tected in visual search tasks, which seems to support another theory, the social emotional selectivity theory. So, which one of the ahovetwo theories is more capable of explaining the developmental characteristics of visual preference of facial expressions？ The question calls for a study comparing adults and children. The two hypotheses of the study are ： （ 1 ） Due to the increase in the dependence of so cial interaction, there is a significant difference in the preferred expression types in terms of attention characteristics between children and adults, with the latter preferring positive expressions. （2） There is a significant difference in the preferred facial parts of an expres sion between adults and children, which, if verified, should provide empirical evidence in favor of the social emotional selectivity theo ry Facial parts of fixation and its lengths, often assumed to directly reflect the allocation of visual attention, also play important roles in the visual preference of facial expression. In this study, an eye tracker was employed to look into the developmental characteristics of both children＇ sand adults＇ viewing of facial expressions. 45 children and 39 undergraduate subjects enrolled were instructed to view pictures of 5 different facial expressions, which were fear, anger, sadness, surprise and happiness, and their eye movements were recor ded with a Tobii eye tracker durir, g the process. The results analyzed with ANOVA show that there are differences in adults＇ and children＇ s visual preference of emotional expres sions. First, the preference to happy expressions by adults is not observed in children. Second, adults make more fixations in viewing happy faces compared to children. Third, adults are more likely to look at the eyes but children are more likely to look at the mouth. The study suggests that human expression of happiness has become more visually preferred byadults as a result of evolutionbecause the social dependency on positive emotions is less ambiguous than other facial expressions, and the visual preference of different facial parts could be related to these developmental changes.