Insomniacs Misidentify Angry Faces as Fearful Faces Because of Missing the Eyes : An Eye-Tracking Study

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

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Detail(s)

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCogSci 2017
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Pages1430-1435
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2017

Conference

Title39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2017
PlaceUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period26 - 29 July 2017

Abstract

Insomniacs were found to have compromised perception of facial expressions. Through eye movement examinations, here we test the hypothesis that this effect is due to impaired visual attention functions for retrieving diagnostic features in facial expression judgments. 23 individuals with insomnia symptoms and 23 non-insomniac controls completed a task to categorize happy, sad, fearful, and angry faces. The insomniacs were less accurate to recognize angry faces and made more “fearful” mistakes than controls. A hidden Markov modeling approach for eye movement data analysis revealed that when recognizing angry faces, more insomniacs adopted an eye movement pattern focusing on the mouth while more controls adopted a pattern attending to both the eyes and the mouth. This result is consistent with previous findings that the primary diagnostic feature for recognizing angry faces is the eyes suggesting that impaired information selection through visual attention control may account for the compromised emotion perception in insomniac individuals.

Research Area(s)

  • insomnia, eye-tracking, hidden Markov model, facial expression

Citation Format(s)

Insomniacs Misidentify Angry Faces as Fearful Faces Because of Missing the Eyes: An Eye-Tracking Study. / Zhang, Jinxiao; Chan, Antoni B.; Lau, Esther Y. Y. et al.
CogSci 2017: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society . 2017. p. 1430-1435.

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review