Looking just below the eyes is optimal across face recognition tasks.

ABSTRACT: When viewing a human face, people often look toward the eyes. Maintaining good eye contact carries significant social value and allows for the extraction of information about gaze direction. When identifying faces, humans also look toward the eyes, but it is unclear whether this behavior is solely a byproduct of the socially important eye movement behavior or whether it has functional importance in basic perceptual tasks. Here, we propose that gaze behavior while determining a person's identity, emotional state, or gender can be explained as an adaptive brain strategy to learn eye movement plans that optimize performance in these evolutionarily important perceptual tasks. We show that humans move their eyes to locations that maximize perceptual performance determining the identity, gender,

SUBMITTER: Peterson MF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3511732 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature