The development of perceptual-attentional processes of children in the recognition of basic emotional facial expressions: an eye-tracking study

Abstract

The current study investigated the role of facial areas in the recognition of six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust) as well as the perceptual and attentional development of emotion recognition in school aged children. Participants viewed images of emotional facial expressions at various intensities and were asked to identify which emotion was being expressed while their eye movements were being tracked. Happiness was the easiest emotion to recognize, followed by anger then sadness for all children. The hardest emotions to recognize were surprise (5-year-olds) and fear (10-year-olds). Surprise was also the only emotion for which a difference between age groups occurred. All children spent more time looking at the eye/brow area for all emotions but anger. Only one relationship between recognition accuracy and time spent on different areas was found. The results of this study highlight the complexity of emotion recognition in developing children.