MAKS Research Seminar: Idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns when viewing faces

Event: MAKS Research Seminar: Idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns when viewing faces

Date: Thursday 7 May 2026

Time: 12:15 - 14:00 (CET)

Venue: MKS 414, MAKS Building

12:15 Idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns when viewing faces

Speaker: Prof. William G. Hayward, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Hosted by: Dept. of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences

13:00 Q & A session/informal discussion

Faces all show the same basic facial features in the same general arrangement, but observers do not all adopt the same eye-movement patterns when looking at them.

Research from a number of independent labs shows that people show differences in their preferred positions of the first few fixations on a face, with some people preferring to fixate higher on the face, typically around the eyes, and others preferring to fixate lower on the face, around the nose and mouth. In our lab, we have been interested in several aspects of this phenomenon.

First, we examined whether classic face perception demonstrations, such as the composite face effect, were affected by these idiosyncratic fixation patterns (Zhong, et al., 2023). Second, we conducted two experiments that demonstrated how face-viewing preferences affect face-sensitive event-related potentials (ERPs) (Zhong, et al., under review). Third, we examined whether we could shift observers’ preferences by manipulating the information available for them at study (specifically, biasing them to focus on the eyes of a face when encoding it) (Zhong et al., in preparation).

Finally, we have been examining whether differences in social anxiety are associated with such differences in fixation patterns for faces between individuals (Xie, et al., in preparation). Taken together, this programme of research shows that these idiosyncratic patterns of fixation to faces have subtle but observable effects on cognitive and neural processing of faces, and appear to
have relationships with other psychological variables.

Prof. William Hayward is Dean of Social Sciences and Chair Professor of Psychology at Lingnan University. Before joining Lingnan, he was Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, and Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as well as holding academic appointments at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Wollongong, Australia.

A native of New Zealand, he holds a BA and MA from the University of Canterbury, and a PhD in Psychology from Yale University, USA. With a career in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, Professor Hayward’s research focuses on how we achieve understanding of the world around us through our use of visual information; in particular, he measures both behaviour and neural activity in response to faces and objects, and to shifts of visual attention. He has held a large number of grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, including 14 GRFs and one Strategic Topics Grant as Co-PI. In addition, for 2026 he was awarded the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship by the HKRGC. He is a member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Panel of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and was formerly Associate Editor of the British Journal of Psychology and Visual Cognition.