An eye-tracking study on the association between affective traits and global-local processing

Abstract

The current study examined the association between global-local processing and various sub-clinical level negative affective traits using an eye tracking design. The study was conducted on 77 students of the University of Hong Kong. Participants were asked to complete a series of tasks, including face perception, global-local processing and preliminary cognitive tasks. They were also asked to complete the 21-item Chinese version of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale. Using HMM for eye movement analysis, two significantly different representative HMMs were computed for the eye movement patterns of both the face matching and face recognition tasks. However, contrary to past studies, a more analytic eye movement pattern did not associate with better performance in face perception tasks. Furthermore, this study failed to find correlations between negative affective traits and performance on global-local processing tasks. Despite the inconclusive findings, it was suggested that the current experiment parameters could be replicated with a mixed sample of both clinical and non-clinical subjects to once again test the proposed hypotheses. With the theoretical groundwork drawn from previous studies, future findings could help better understand the prodromal neurocognitive functioning related to negative affective traits.