Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has revealed two different eye movement pat-terns during face recognition: holistic and analytic. The pre-sent study investigated the neural correlates of these two pat-terns through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).A more holistic pattern was associated with more activation inthe face-selective perceptual areas, including the occipitalface area and fusiform face area. In contrast, participants us-ing a more analytic pattern demonstrated more activation inareas important for top-down control of visual attention, in-cluding the frontal eye field and intraparietal sulcus. In addi-tion, participants using the analytic patterns had better recog-nition performance than those showing holistic patterns. The-se results suggest that analytic eye movement patterns are as-sociated with more engagement of top-down control of visualattention, which may consequently enhance recognition per-formance.