Orientation biases for facial emotion recognition during childhood and adulthood.

Facial emotion recognition develops slowly, with continuing changes in performance observable up to 10 years of age and beyond. In the current study, we chose to examine how the use of specific low-level visual features for emotion recognition may change during childhood. Adults exhibit information biases for face recognition; specific spatial frequency and orientation sub-bands make a larger contribution to recognition than others.

Emotion recognition (sometimes) depends on horizontal orientations.

Face recognition depends critically on horizontal orientations (Goffaux & Dakin, Frontiers in Psychology, 1(143), 1-14, 2010): Face images that lack horizontal features are harder to recognize than those that have this information preserved. We asked whether facial emotional recognition also exhibits this dependency by asking observers to categorize orientation-filtered happy and sad expressions. Furthermore, we aimed to dissociate image-based orientation energy from object-based orientation by rotating images 90 deg in the picture plane.