Crying Expression Face In The Process Of Identification And Dissociation Of The Attention Of The Characteristics: Evidence From The Eye Movement

Compared with stimulus without emotion, emotional stimulus can attract attention quickly or take up more attentional resources, namely emotional stimulus can induce attention bias.Considerable studies researched attentional bias of emotional stimulus from the activation process of stimulus, and in studies they often used fear, anger and sad face as emotional stimulus.But attention includes two coordinated processes of the activation of target stimulus and the inhibition of unassociated stimulus. And crying face as negative emotional stimulus is different from fear and anger face. So it is necessary to investigate the characteristic of attentional bias of crying face in this two processes.The current study included two experiments. In experiment 1, a two-choice oddball task(standard vs. deviant ratio: 75%:25%) was adopted, and we used crying and smile faces as deviant stimuli. Two-choice oddball task imitated contingency of the emergence of crying and smile faces well. And we recorded the eye-movement while participants were recognizing the faces. In experiment 2, we used a cue-target paradigm. We used crying, smile and neutral faces as clue stimuli to investigate the effect of different face clues on inhibition of return(IOR). We supposed when crying and smile faces as deviant stimuli, crying face had attentional advantage,and when those faces as clue stimuli, in the valid clue condition, crying face clue could induce the difficulty in IOR.Repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted for experiment 1. The results showed that the recognition accuracy for crying face was greater than smile face significantly and the reaction time for crying face was shorter than smile face. The saccade amplitude, saccade count and fixation count for crying face were less than smile face. In addition, the gender of face affects expression recognition. The saccade count and fixation count for female face were less than male face, while the fixation count for females’ smile face is more than females’ crying face. Repeated measures ANOVAs of clue(valid clue, invalid clue) and facial expression type(crying, smile and neutral) were conducted for experiment 2. There was an interaction effect between clue and facial expression type. In valid clue condition, the fixation time under crying clue was shorter than neutral clue, that is to say, there was a difficult IOR under crying clue.In conclusion, the results demonstrated that crying face could induce attention bias. The attention bias not only showed in quickly response, optimized recognition model and the effect of gender of face on facial expression recognition, but also showed in IOR, there was a difficulit IOR under crying clue.