Many theorists have described faces as the single most important visual pattern in our environment, vital in the regulation of social interactions. The ability to discriminate among emotional expressions appears extremely early in human newborns and there appears to be considerable cross-cultural agreement about the meaning of facial expression. Among the wealth of information provided by faces, the expression of emotion appears to be one of the most powerful and important. However, research attempts to characterize the speed and efficiency of the processing of such facial stimuli have yielded equivocal findings. Several authors have reported rather slow and inefficient search times for emotional expressions suggesting that ‘the perceptual aspects of face processing may be more difficult even for normal subjects than was generally thought’. On the other hand, a few experiments have shown evidence of extremely fast and efficient processing of certain emotional expressions. Recent results from my laboratory suggest that, even though the overall processing of facial expressions is on average slow, the processing of emotional expressions is faster than that of neutral expressions. The aim of this project is to verify and to characterise more precisely this asymmetry in the processing of facial expressions. The results of this project will broaden our understanding of how facial expressions are coded and processed by the visual system.
Spehar B "Captured by emotions: Attention and processing of facial expressions" Face Processing Symposium, The Australasian Ophthalmic and Vision Science Meeting, Sydney, 7-9 December 2001
Spehar B "Search asymmetries in face processing" Face and Object Processing Symposium, The 6th Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society. University of Western Australia, 3-5 April 2002
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