Fear-specific leftward bias in gaze direction judgment

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Visual Perception
• Human Behaviour

Background:

• Humans display a known left spatial attention bias in cognition and behavior.
• The existence of a leftward perception bias specifically for gaze direction remains unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether a leftward perception bias for gaze direction exists.
• To determine if face emotion modulates this potential bias.
• To elucidate the role of emotional versus low-level facial features in gaze perception.

Main Methods:

• Three behavioral experiments utilizing a forced-choice gaze direction judgment task.
• Measurement of the point of subjective equality (PSE) to detect perceptual bias.
• Inclusion of fearful, angry, happy, neutral, inverted faces, and inverted eyes to analyze emotional and feature contributions.

Main Results:

• A significant leftward perception bias was observed for fearful faces, indicated by a positive PSE.
• This bias was specific to fearful faces and not present for angry, happy, or neutral faces.
• The leftward bias persisted across different face types (inverted faces, inverted eyes), suggesting emotional content, not low-level features, drives the effect.

Conclusions:

• Demonstrates a fear-specific leftward perception bias in processing gaze direction.
• Highlights the influence of emotional information in modulating gaze perception.
• Provides novel insights into cerebral lateralization and spatial biases in humans.