Pushing the boundaries of human expertise in face perception: Emotion expression identification and error as a function of presentation angle, presentation time, and emotion

• Parents viewed child faces displaying various emotional expressions. • Faces were viewed for different durations (unlimited, 600 ms, 100 ms). • Different face views (full-face, 45° profile, 90° profile) were presented. • Emotion identification accuracy was very poor when 90° faces were viewed for 100 ms. • Faces displaying sadness and faces displaying anger were most often confused. a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Past research results suggest that reliable identification of emotions conveyed by facial expressions can be made either when faces are: (1) briefly glimpsed, or (2) viewed in profile. Of interest was whether such effects would persist when perceivers encountered both manipulations, briefly (100 ms) viewing 90-degree profile faces. Our results show that expertise in emotion perception has limits: Identification accuracy of emotions conveyed by facial expressions was poor when 90-degree profile views of faces were presented for only 100 ms, especially for the emotions of sadness and anger. Our results also suggest that: (1) overall, observers can more accurately perceive happiness in faces than they could perceive negative emotions, and (2) in relatively easy viewing conditions, identification of faces displaying sadness and anger were most often confused, but when 90-degree profile faces were viewed for only 100ms, sad faces and angry faces were most often misidentified as neutral faces. Introduction Perceivers readily proceed from observations of actor behaviors to inferences about the actor's unobservable states and traits (McCarthy suggest that perceivers first identify the meaning of a facial expression, then use that extracted meaning in the process of making an inference about the actor's internal emotion. The present article focuses on the identification stage of this process, and in particular, on the possible role that expertise in face processing plays there. Humans are thought to be expert face processors (see Aviezer, Bentin, Dudarev, & Hassin, 2011; Curby & Gauthier, 2010). This expertise is revealed in multiple ways. For example: (1) face perception is very sensitive to subtle changes in spatial relations among face features (2) adults can detect changes in facial feature configurations that approach the limits of normal visual acuity (Haig, 1984). Moreover, in their domain of expertise, experts have an enhanced ability to recognize familiar patterns, even under difficult processing conditions (De Groot & Gobet, 1996). This rule also applies to face perception. For example, perceivers readily identify facial expressions, …