Differences in allocations of attention to faces during affective learning of Chinese people

Abstract

If one neutral object predicts a rewarding or threatening outcome, this object will acquire affective value, and this process is known as affective learning. Western participants showed robust affective learning in previous research. Moreover, affective learning influenced face perception. However, the mechanism of this phenomenon remains unclear. In the present study, we used eye-tracking to investigate whether Chinese participants paid more attention to faces paired with sentences describing negative behaviors in the learning phase. Consistent with Western participants, Chinese participants learned affective information of faces. In addition, the gaze patterns showed that Chinese participants looked more at faces presented with negative and neutral sentences than those presented with positive faces. The present research indicates that affective learning is not impacted by culture. Moreover, participants pay more attention at faces paired with negative and neutral sentences during learning, which may lead to different affective learning effects. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.