Modulation of mood on eye movement and face recognition performance

Abstract

In face recognition, looking at the eyes has been associated with engagement of local attention, as well as better recognition performance. As recent research has suggested negative mood facilitates local attention while positive mood facilitates global attention, negative mood changes may lead to more eyes-focused eye movement patterns and consequently enhance recognition performance. Here we test this hypothesis using mood induction. Through eye movement analysis with hidden Markov models, we discovered eyes-focused and nose-focused eye movement strategies in the participants, and the eyes-focused strategy was associated with better recognition performance. During the recognition phase, participants with a negative mood change had increased eye movement pattern similarity to the eyes-focused strategy, and participants’ mood change was correlated with eye movement pattern similarity change. Nevertheless, mood change did not significantly change participants’ eye movement strategy classification despite changes in eye movement pattern similarity, and the eye movement pattern similarity change did not modulate recognition performance. These results suggest that mood changes through mood induction lead to slight changes in eye movement pattern that may not be sufficient to modulate recognition performance. Thus, individuals may have preferred eye movement strategies in face recognition impervious to transitory mood changes. This finding is consistent with a recent speculation on limited plasticity in adult face recognition and suggests that eye movements in face recognition may provide reliable information about an individual’s cognitive abilities.