Idiosyncratic fixation patterns generalize across dynamic and static facial expression recognition

Abstract Facial expression recognition (FER) is crucial for understanding the emotional state of others during human social interactions. It has been assumed that humans share universal visual sampling strategies to achieve this task. However, recent studies in face identification have revealed striking idiosyncratic fixation patterns, questioning the universality of face processing. More importantly, very little is known about whether such idiosyncrasies extend to the biological relevant recognition of static and dynamic facial expressions of emotion (FEEs). To clarify this issue, we tracked observers’ eye movements categorizing static and ecologically valid dynamic faces displaying the six basic FEEs, all normalized for time presentation (1 s), contrast and global luminance across exposure time. We then used robust data-driven analyses combining statistical fixation maps with hidden Markov Models to explore eye-movements across FEEs and stimulus modalities. Our data revealed three spatially and temporally distinct equally occurring face scanning strategies during FER. Crucially, such visual sampling strategies were mostly comparably effective in FER and highly consistent across FEEs and modalities. Our findings show that spatiotemporal idiosyncratic gaze strategies also occur for the biologically relevant recognition of FEEs, further questioning the universality of FER and, more generally, face processing.