The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral.

The faces were standardized according to the so-called Facial Action Coding System (FACS) such that each expression displayed a specific combination of facial muscles typically associated with each feeling of emotion.

They then compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

It turned out that easterners focussed much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than westerners did.

These results were published online in Current Biology.