ABSTRACT

When people recognize faces, they normally move their eyes so that their first fixation is in the optimal location for efficient perceptual processing. This location is found just below the centre-point between the eyes. This type of attentional bias could be partly innate, but also an inevitable developmental process that aids our ability to recognize faces. We investigated whether a group of people with developmental prosopagnosia would also demonstrate neurotypical first fixation locations when recognizing faces during an eye-tracking task. We found evidence that adults with prosopagnosia had atypically heterogeneous first fixations in comparison to controls. However, differences were limited to the vertical, but not horizontal, plane of the face. We interpret these findings by suggesting that subtle changes to face-based eye movement patterns in developmental prosopagnosia may underpin their face recognition impairments, and suggest future work is still needed to address this possibility.

摘要

当人们识别出脸部时，他们通常会移动眼睛，以使其第一眼注视处于最佳位置以进行有效的感知处理。该位置位于眼睛之间的中心点下方。这种类型的注意偏见可能是天生的，但也是不可避免的发展过程，有助于我们识别人脸。我们调查了一群发展性停经症患者在眼动追踪任务中识别面部时是否还会表现出典型的神经固定性第一固定位置。我们发现有证据表明，与对照组相比，患有围绝症的成年人具有非典型的异形初次固定。但是，差异仅限于脸部的垂直而不是水平的平面。