In face recognition, eye gaze to the eye region is reported to be associated with better performance than to the center of a face. Nevertheless, Caucasians and Asians differ in how much they look at the eyes when they scan a face, but have comparable identification performance. To resolve this issue, here we test the hypothesis that optimal face recognition performance involves a balance between global and local face processing. Thus, Asians may benefit from enhancement of local processing and vice versa for Caucasians. We showed that local attention priming using hierarchical letter stimuli led to more eye-focused eye movement patterns compared to global attention priming in both Asians and Caucasians. However, Asians had better performance after local priming than global priming, whereas Caucasian showed the opposite effect. These results suggest that engagement of global/local attention leads to face-center/eye biased eye movements respectively, and optimal recognition performance involves both global and local processing/gaze transitions between the face center and eyes.

We examined whether mask use had differential impacts on face and facial expression recognition across cultures, as cultures associated with more eyes-focused face scanning strategies may be less affected. Asian and White participants performed face and facial expression recognition with unmasked and masked Asian and White faces. White participants attended more to the eye region in both tasks; however, their performance was less impaired by mask use only in facial expression recognition. In both tasks, individuals adopting more eyes-focused strategies for unmasked faces were less impaired by mask use. Also, participants had larger performance impairment for judging expressions of Asian than White faces, consistent with the finding that they adopted more nose-focused strategies for Asian than White faces. Thus, although individuals from different cultures or expression recognition of different races may be affected differentially by mask use, these effects may be better explained by individual differences in preferred attention strategies.