Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research has suggested negative mood facilitates local attention while positive mood facilitates global attention. In facerecognition, looking at the eyes has been associated with engagement of local attention as well as better recognitionperformance. Accordingly, negative mood changes may lead to more eyes-focused eye movements and consequentlyenhance recognition performance. We tested this hypothesis using mood induction. Through Eye Movement analysis withHidden Markov Models (EMHMM), we discovered eyes-focused and nose-focused strategies. Although negative moodchanges predicted increased eye movement pattern similarity to the eyes-focused strategy, it did not predict changes inrecognition performance. Furthermore, most participants did not switch between eyes-focused and nose-focused strategiesdespite changes in mood. We conclude that mood changes lead to eye movement pattern changes that are not sufficientto modulate recognition performance as individuals may have preferred eye movement strategies impervious to transitorymood changes.