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(Micro)saccade-related potentials during face recognition: A study combining EEG, eye-tracking, and deconvolution modeling

View ORCID ProfileLisa Spiering, View ORCID ProfileOlaf Dimigen
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.06.16.545272
Lisa Spiering
1Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
3Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
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Olaf Dimigen
2Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
3Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
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  • For correspondence: olaf.dimigen@rug.nl
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ABSTRACT

Under natural viewing conditions, complex stimuli such as human faces are typically looked at several times in succession, implying that their recognition may unfold across multiple eye fixations. Although electrophysiological (EEG) experiments on face recognition typically prohibit eye movements, participants still execute frequent (micro)saccades on the face, each of which generates its own visuocortical response. This finding raises the question of whether the fixation-related potentials (FRPs) evoked by these tiny gaze shifts also contain psychologically valuable information about face processing. Here we investigated this question by co-recording EEG and eye movements in an experiment with emotional faces (happy, angry, neutral). Deconvolution modeling was used to separate the stimulus-ERPs to face onset from the FRPs generated by subsequent microsaccades-induced refixations on the face. As expected, stimulus-ERPs exhibited typical emotion effects, with a larger early posterior negativity (EPN) for happy/angry compared to neutral faces. Eye-tracking confirmed that participants made small saccades within the face in 98% of the trials. However, while each saccade produced a strong response over visual areas, this response was unaffected by the face’s emotional expression, both for the first and for subsequent (micro)saccades. This finding suggests that the face’s affective content is rapidly evaluated after stimulus onset, leading to only a short-lived sensory enhancement by arousing stimuli that does not repeat itself during immediate refixations. Methodologically, our work demonstrates how eye-tracking and deconvolution modeling can be used to extract several brain responses from each EEG trial, providing insights into neural processing at different latencies after stimulus onset.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Author note: We thank Bagherzadeh-Azbari and colleagues (2023) for sharing the datasets analyzed in the present study. Supporting data and code are found at https://osf.io/e2rtp.

  • https://osf.io/e2rtp

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted June 21, 2023.
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(Micro)saccade-related potentials during face recognition: A study combining EEG, eye-tracking, and deconvolution modeling
Lisa Spiering, Olaf Dimigen
bioRxiv 2023.06.16.545272; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.06.16.545272
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(Micro)saccade-related potentials during face recognition: A study combining EEG, eye-tracking, and deconvolution modeling
Lisa Spiering, Olaf Dimigen
bioRxiv 2023.06.16.545272; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.06.16.545272

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