The Perceptual Experience of Portraits and Self-Portraits: A Behavioural and Eye-Tracking Study

Studies on the lateralization of facial perception and the asymmetry of facial emotional expressions date back to the 19th century. Several left-side biases have been identified: greater expressivity of the left side of the face, a left cheek bias (i.e. a preference to display one’s left cheek), a left visual field advantage (i.e. a preference and improved performance when stimuli are presented in the left visual field), a left gaze bias (i.e. a preference to direct and to spend more time looking at the left side of centrally presented faces, i.e. the anatomical right side). The simultaneous occurrence of these left-side biases, however, has hardly been studied. Thus, we recorded participants’ visual scan-paths and emotional intensity ratings of the depicted faces of pre-19th century self-portraits (i.e. anatomical left side of the face in the left visual field), portraits (i.e. anatomical left side of the face in the right visual field), and their mirror-reversed formats. Self-portraits evoked greater emotional intensity ratings and shorter latencies of the first fixation than portraits, regardless of their format. In addition, for self-portraits the duration of the first fixation was longer for the anatomical left hemi-face. We hypothesize that the observation of self-portraits may arouse greater sensorimotor engagement in the observer as a result of the greater sensorimotor engagement of the artist while painting them.