Selective binding of facial features reveals dynamic expression fragments

Abstract

The temporal correspondence between two arbitrarily chosen pairs of alternating features can generally be reported for rates up to 3-4 Hz. This limit is however surpassed for specialised visual mechanisms that encode conjunctions of features. Here we show that this 3-4 Hz limit is exceeded for eye gaze and eyebrow pairing, but not for eye gaze and mouth pairing, suggesting combined eye and eyebrow motion constitutes a dynamic expression fragment; a building block of superordinate facial actions.