Expressions of emotions in minimal face perception stimuli

Face perception is considered to be a canonical example of con gurational visual processing.
However, not all facial information is equally important when reading facial expressions. The
eyes and mouth seem to be crucial, but they seem to have different roles and signi cance. By vary-
ing the shape of the mouth, eyes, and other factors, we conducted two experiments: rst, we
examined eye movements depending on different facial con gurations and different types of
instructions (neutral and emotionally valenced); second, we used the same types of stimuli in a rat-
ing task. Our results indicate that the eyes provide a primary impact (when eye xations are mea-
sured), which can be explained by the evolutionary need to establish gaze contact, but once facial
expressions are observed, the mouth seems to be more signi cant.