Abstract
Facial expression recognition is crucial for the success of social interactions. A dominant idea in the field is that variations in the ability to recognize facial expressions are associated with the effectiveness of visual strategies. This idea is in part based on the finding that individuals with autism, schizophrenia and prosopagnosia show both an altered performance at recognizing facial expressions and altered visual strategies. However, a study by Yitzhak et al. (2020) investigated this association in the normal population and found that eye fixation patterns did not predict performance in a basic facial expression categorization task. The present study investigates this association (N=66) using a combination of five measures of facial expression recognition ability: Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, Films Expression Task, Megamix and two tasks of basic facial expressions categorization. Eye fixation patterns were measured during a facial expression categorization task. A Cluster analysis was conducted to group participants with similar eye fixation patterns. Three patterns were found: extreme upper-face fixations, mild upper-face fixations, lower-face fixations. A principal component analysis on our performance measures was conducted on the five ability measures and revealed two ability components. Replicating the finding of Yitzhak et al. (2020), no ability difference was found across the three fixation patterns. Given the partial dissociation between eye fixations and information utilization, future studies should investigate the association between the ability at recognizing facial expressions and visual strategies using methods that allow to measure what visual information is actually used by participants to succeed at this task.