Mapping face recognition information use across cultures

Face recognition is not rooted in a universal eye movement information-gathering strat-egy. Western observers favor a local facial feature sampling strategy, whereas Eastern observers prefer sampling face information from a global, central fixation strategy.Yet, the precise qualitative (the diagnostic) and quantitative (the amount) information underlying these cultural perceptual biases in face recognition remains undetermined.To this end, we monitored the eye movements of Western and Eastern observers during a face recogni-tion task, with a novel gaze-contingent technique: the Expanding Spotlight. We used 2˚ Gaussian apertures centered on the observers ’ fixations expanding dynamically at a rate of 1 ˚ every 25 ms at each fixation – the longer the fixation duration, the larger the aperture size. Identity-specific face information was only displayed within the Gaussian aperture; outside the aperture, an average face template was displayed to facilitate saccade plan-ning. Thus, the Expanding Spotlight simultaneously maps out the facial information span at each fixation location. Data obtained with the Expanding Spotlight technique confirmed that Westerners extract more information from the eye region, whereas Easterners extract more information from the nose region. Interestingly, this quantitative difference was paire