Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2011 Feb;37(1):48-57. doi: 10.1037/a0019962.
There is mixed evidence on the nature of the relationship between the perception of gaze direction and the perception of facial expressions. Major support for shared processing of gaze and expression comes from behavioral studies that showed that observers cannot process expression or gaze and ignore irrelevant variations in the other dimension. However, these studies have not considered the role of head orientation, which is known to play a key role in the processing of gaze direction. In a series of experiments, the relationship between the processing of expression and gaze was tested both with head orientation held constant and with head orientation varied between trials, making it a relevant source of information for computing gaze direction. Results show that when head orientation varied between trials, the processing of facial expression was not interfered with gaze direction, and conversely, the processing of gaze could be made without being interfered from irrelevant variations in expression. These findings suggest that the processing of gaze and the processing of expression are not functionally interconnected as was previously assumed.
关于注视方向感知和面部表情感知之间关系的本质，存在混合的证据。注视和表情的处理是共享的，这一主要观点来自于行为研究，这些研究表明观察者不能在处理表情或注视的同时忽略另一个维度中不相关的变化。然而，这些研究没有考虑到头部方向的作用，头部方向已知在注视方向的处理中起着关键作用。在一系列实验中，无论是在保持头部方向不变的情况下，还是在试验之间改变头部方向的情况下，都测试了表情和注视之间的处理关系，这使得头部方向成为计算注视方向的相关信息来源。结果表明，当试验之间的头部方向发生变化时，面部表情的处理不会受到注视方向的干扰，相反，注视的处理可以不受表情中不相关变化的干扰。这些发现表明，注视和表情的处理不像以前假设的那样在功能上相互关联。
