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We examined the degree to which differences in face recognition rates across emotional expression conditions varied concomitantly with differences in mean objective image similarity. Effects of emotional expression on face recognition performance were measured via an old/new recognition paradigm in which stimuli at both learning and testing had happy, neutral, and angry expressions. Results showed an advantage for faces learned with neutral expressions, as well as for angry faces at testing. Performance data was compared to three quantitative image-similarity indices. Findings showed that mean human performance was strongly correlated with mean image similarity, suggesting that the former may be at least partly explained by the latter. Our findings sound a cautionary note regarding the necessity of considering low-level stimulus properties as explanations for findings that otherwise may be prematurely attributed to higher order phenomena such as attention or emotional arousal.

The perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis posits that the confusion between emotional facial expressions of fear and surprise may be due to their visual similarity, with shared muscle movements. In Experiment 1 full face images of fear and surprise varying as a function of distinctiveness (mouth index, brow index, or both indices) were displayed in a gender oddball task. Experiment 2, in a similar task, directed attention toward the eye or mouth region with a blurring technique. The current two studies used response time and event-related potentials (ERP) to test the perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis. While ERP results for Experiment 1 suggested that individuals may not have perceived a difference between the emotional expressions in any of the conditions, response time results suggested that individuals processed a difference between fear and surprise when a distinctive cue was in the mouth. With directed attention in Experiment 2, ERP results indicated that individuals were capable of detecting a difference in all the conditions. In effect, the current two experiments suggest that participants display difficulty in distinguishing the prototypes of fear and surprise with the eye region, which may be due to a lack of attention to that region, providing support for the attentional limitation hypothesis.

While a smile can reflect felt happiness, it can also be voluntarily produced, for instance, to mask negative emotions. Masking strategies are not always perfect and traces of the negative emotion can leak. The current study examined the role of traces of anger, sadness, fear and disgust in the judgment of authenticity of smiles. Participants judged the authenticity of the smiles while their eye movements were recorded. They were also asked if the stimuli comprised another emotion and, if so, what the emotion was. Results revealed that participants were sensitive to traces of negative emotions. Variations were observed between emotions with performance being best for traces of fear and lowest for traces of anger in the eyebrows in the judgment task. However, when the presence of a negative emotion was reported, participants were less accurate in identifying fear but more accurate in identifying anger. Furthermore, variations were observed as a function of the location of the trace whether in the mouth or eyes as a function of the emotion. Traces in the eyebrows were associated with better performance than traces in the mouth for sadness but the opposite was observed for anger. The performance at the judgment task was not linked to eye movement measures or explicit knowledge of the masked emotion. Future research should explore other explanation for the variations in performance in the judgments of authenticity of masking smiles such as emotional contagion.

In the current study the reading speed of the narration and the difficulty of the text was manipulated and links were explored with children’s attention to the printed text in shared book reading. Thirty-nine children (24 grade 1 and 15 grade 2) were presented easy and difficult books at slow (syllable by syllable) or fast (adult reading speed) pace while their eye movements were monitored. Results revealed an interaction between speed and difficulty. For the easy and difficult books, children spent more time and made more fixations on the printed text when it was presented at slow speed than at fast speed. However, at fast speed, children spend more time and made more fixations on the text of the easy rather than the difficult books, but at slow speed no difference was observed. In addition, at slow speed positive correlations were observed between attention to print and letter knowledge and word reading skills. Results provide important information for the practice of shared book reading suggesting that to increase attention to print, speed should be reduced. Future research should investigate the role of reading speed on reading related outcomes such as discourse comprehension and children’s interest in reading activities.

The current study examined the effect of pointing to the words and using highlighted text by examining eye movements when children in preschool, Grade 1 and 2 were read storybooks of two levels of difficulty. For all children, pointing to and highlighting the text was observed to increase the amount of time and number of fixations on the printed text than when there was no intervention. Furthermore, with difficult text, an increased amount of time and number of fixations was observed when the text was pointed to than when it was highlighted. For preschoolers, even with the increased attention on the text from pointing to and highlighting the words, the fixations did not match the narration. First and second graders, with the difficult book, made more matching fixations both when the printed text was pointed to and highlighted than when no intervention was done. Additionally, more matching fixations were made when the printed text was highlighted than when pointed to. Future research is required to examine the effects of attention-orienting strategies on reading related outcomes.

When reading a text and searching for a target letter, readers make more omissions of the target letter if it is embedded in frequent function words than if it is in rare content words. While word frequency effects are consistently found, few studies have examined the impacts of passage familiarity on the missing-letter effect and studies that have present conflicting evidence. The present study examines the effects of passage familiarity, as well as the impacts of passage familiarization strategy promoting surface or deep encoding, on the missing-letter effect. Participants were familiarized with a passage by retyping a text, replacing all common nouns with synonyms, or generating a text on the same topic as that of the original text, and then completed a letter search task on the familiar passage as well as an unfamiliar passage. In Experiment 1, when both familiar and unfamiliar passages use the same words, results revealed fewer omissions for the retyping and synonyms conditions. However, in Experiment 2, when different words are used in both types of texts, no effect of familiarization strategy was observed. Furthermore, the missing-letter effect is maintained in all conditions, adding support to the robustness of the effect regardless of familiarity with the text.