Two fixations suffice in face recognition

Abstract

It is well known that there exist preferred landing positions for eye fixations in visual word recognition. However, the existence of preferred landing positions in face recognition is less well established. It is also unknown how many fixations are required to recognize a face. To investigate these questions, we recorded eye movements during face recognition. During an otherwise standard face-recognition task, subjects were allowed a variable number of fixations before the stimulus was masked. We found that optimal recognition performance is achieved with two fixations; performance does not improve with additional fixations. The distribution of the first fixation is just to the left of the center of the nose, and that of the second fixation is around the center of the nose. Thus, these appear to be the preferred landing positions for face recognition. Furthermore, the fixations made during face learning differ in location from those made during face recognition and are also more variable in duration; this suggests that different strategies are used for face learning and face recognition. Copyright © 2008 Association for Psychological Science.