**3.2 Eye-tracking evidence**

Evidence from eye-tracking studies has suggested that participants employed distinct processing strategies to fetch visual information from faces in crosscultural studies. For instance, participants are instructed to learn, recognize, and categorize faces of Western Caucasians and East Asians according to race, and their eye movements were monitored. Results revealed that Western participants tended to fixate on a triangular region (eyes and mouth) of faces, not affected by facial races and tasks; While East Asian observers paid more attention to the central region (nose) of faces [44]. Moreover, Kelly et al. asked children aged 7–12 from the UK and China to complete an old/new face recognition task while simultaneously recording their eye movements. The patterns of fixations observed in children are consistent with those of adults from their respective cultural groups reported in previous studies [44, 45], that is, children from the UK fixated more on the eyes and mouth regions whereas children from China fixated more centrally on the nose region. These findings distinguished different fixation patterns for western and eastern subjects during face recognition.

#### **3.3 Neural evidence**

Many studies have also examined differences in neural responses to faces in observers from different countries. For example, Wang et al. investigated whether distinct attended areas between two cultures tunes the time course of face processing towards configural and featural information respectively. In this experiment, participants were asked to judge the two concurrent faces identical, the two faces either different in the distance between the face features (configural processing), or in the face features (featural processing). Results showed that a configural processing bias is associated with P1 amplitude in their own-race faces and other-race faces and a featural processing bias is associated with P2 amplitude for own-race faces in Chinese participants. In contrast, both a featural processing bias for their own-race faces and a configural processing bias for other-race faces are correlated with P1 amplitude, and a configural processing bias for both own- and other-race faces is related to P2 amplitude in Western participants [46]. A recent study conducted by Ma et al. revealed that relative to German children in the second grade, the N170 response to face is remarkably higher in Chinese children [47]. During an fMRI experiment conducted by Goh et al. [48], East Asians and Westerners were asked to passively view Singaporean and American faces and the corresponding scrambled pictures. They found that more neural responses to faces in the bilateral FFA, especially in the left FFA, were found in Western participants, while more neural responses to faces in the right FFA were observed in East Asian participants. In a nutshell, there are stable and reliable neural mechanisms of different participants underlying face processing.

The existing studies showed that differences in processing faces can be attributed to distinctions among disparate social cultures. Indeed, prior work has been made with respect to scene perception [49, 50], description [51], and categorization [52] in support of cultural differences. For example, Western participants paid attention to objects with more salience in an analytic fashion and based on categorization, while East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) paid more attention to relationships and similarities among objects in a holistic fashion when they organized their environment [44]. However, most of these studies did not try to control the participants' second language experience. Therefore, the cultural differences in face processing between Western and Eastern subjects may be confounded by linguistic experiences as well.

## **4. Multilingual experience and face processing**

A great deal of evidence has suggested that the multilingual vs. monolingual experience has a differential impact on the processing of linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. For instance, the cerebral lateralization of the word [1] and face processing [53] has been reduced in bilinguals. Regarding how multilingualism affects linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli processing, three hypotheses were proposed to explain the effect of multilingualism on face processing. One hypothesis is the perceptual expertise hypothesis, that is, the amount of exposure to face modulated face processing [54, 55]. For example, in Canada, there are many immigrants whose children have to learn not only English, but also their mother tongue, and even other languages. At the same time, they are also exposed to different faces, which may make them process faces more efficiently when viewing different faces. This chapter does not intend to spend much time in discussing the relationship between the amount of exposure to face and face processing given that much work with respect to this hypothesis has been done.

The second hypothesis is that attention is reshaped by visual features of the script. According to the second hypothesis, during the process of learning words,

#### *The Role of Multilingual Script Systems in Face Processing DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101539*

language shapes how its language user deploys the attentional resource to the visual processing of words. For example, Awadh et al. found that French and Spanish individuals possess lower visual attentional span than Arabic individuals [56]. This advantage concerning the visual attention span may have been transferred into the processing of faces. Face processing can be attentionally-driven, so it is possible to change the outcomes and mechanisms of face processing by changing individuals' attentional allocation [57, 58]. This hypothesis is partly supported by two recent studies using different script systems, with individuals exposed to different systems behaving differently in the visual processing of face tasks. For example, in the Portuguese script system, Ventura et al. showed that illiterate participants processed faces and houses consistently more holistically compared to literate participants with the composite face paradigm [57]. However, in the Chinese script system, Cao et al. found that literates had a great sensitivity to the spatial configuration of upright, rather than inverted, faces, compared to illiterates in a second-order configuration task [58]. Since social culture was kept constant in the two studies, the inconsistent findings are difficult to be accounted for by the cultural differences, but instead, can be explained by differences in orthographical and visual features in the respective script systems (and possibly the experimental paradigms). On one hand, the face composite paradigm is reflected as the failure to selectively attend to and compare some parts of the face [41]; while the spatial configural distance paradigm typically emphasizes that the viewer attends to the spatial relationship between different parts of the face [59]. Distinct experimental paradigms may ease the level of face processing in different groups of language users. Since the majority of the previous studies demonstrated a generally consistent pattern that East Asian participants show stronger holistic processing compared to Western counterparts, regardless of experimental demands in a short-term task setting, it is more likely that the long-term exposure to the different visual form of a script system (e.g. alphabetical vs. logographic) can be the reason why the attentional allocation is reshaped. On another hand, in terms of visual characteristics, one Chinese character comprises strokes and sub-character components, which is packed into a square configuration with similar size. And Chinese characters are possessed in a highly nonlinear visual complex shape [60, 61]. Portuguese words are comprised of some basic letters, and line-shaped. Extensive exposure to these differences in visual features between both script systems could give rise to distinct reading demands for Chinese in comparison with Portuguese words, which are further transferred into face processing. Additionally, some experts have proposed that the research on the impact of literacy acquisition on cognitive ability should always take differences among the distinct script systems into consideration [62].

Last but not the least, the impact of multilingualism on face processing can be traced to the effect of phonemic differences and their impact on the attentional allocation to a speaker's face (attention-reshaped-by-speech hypothesis). Robust and reliable evidence comes from the comparison between monolingual and bilingual infants. Infants in a bilingual environment fixated more at the mouth region of talking and non-talking faces compared to those in a monolingual environment [63]. Given the absence of the script exposure, these findings cannot be attributed to the differences in visual features between writing systems; In contrast, it is more possible that the language environment to which infants are exposed constrain their visual processing. Using the Cambridge Face Memory Tests, Burns found that bilingual Singaporean Chinese participants showed a decreased other race effect with the increase of reported cross-language proficiency [64]. This relationship was driven by Chinese, rather than English, listening ability. These findings suggested that multilingual exhibit different processing of faces compared with monolinguals is attributed to how words are realized in the face in communication.

Given these remarkable differences between the logographic and alphabetic scripts outlined above, extensive exposure to distinct script systems may result in differences in processing faces. Combined with the existing findings and theories, we proposed that Asian participants with logographic script system process face different from Western counterparts with alphabetic script systems. Future studies are encouraged to clarify these confounding explanations.
