Abstract
Last year (VSS, 2017), we explored the impact of myopia on visual attention as a possible explanation for the perceptual differences observed between Easterners and Westerners: namely, that Easterners have a larger global advantage than Westerners in a Navon Task (McKone et al., 2010); fixate less the eyes and mouth, and more the centre of the face during its processing (Blais et al., 2008); and tend to process faces in lower spatial frequencies (Tardif et al., 2017). Myopes and emmetropes were tested using Navon's paradigm to measure their ability to detect global versus local target letters, and the Spatial Frequency (SF) Bubbles method (Willenbockel et al., 2010a) to measure their use of SFs during a face identification task: we initially found unexpected results suggesting that emmetropes were better than myopes at detecting global letters and that they used lower SFs than the latter group to correctly identity faces. Here, we delved deeper into this inquiry: a greater number of participants were tested with Navon's paradigm (myopes = 18; emmetropes = 29) and with SF Bubbles (myopes = 15; emmetropes = 18). In addition, we measured participants eye-movements during another face recognition task (myopes = 11; emmetropes = 9). In support of our previous findings, our new results indicate that emmetropes have a higher global processing bias than myopes [t(45) = -3.269; p = 0.002], and make greater use of lower SFs, between 4.3 to 5.7 cycles per face [Stat4CI (Chauvin et al., 2005): Zcrit=-3.196, p< 0.025]. Finally, our eye-movement results suggest that emmetropes fixate the center of the face to a greater extent than myopes [analysis with iMap4 (Lao et al., in press)]. These findings offer a new avenue to explore how myopes and emmetropes process information contained in visual stimuli.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018