An Eye-Movement Research On Cartoon Face Processing Of5-6-Year-Old Children In Different Task Situations

As the most common stimulus symbols in people’s daily lives, faces contain information such as gender, age, emotional state and personality characteristics, which play an important role in people’s social interaction. Thus recognizing face quickly and accurately is a significant capacity for each individual who lives in the human society. Compared with adults, cartoon images similarly occupy an important position in the world of young children. As the core elements of cartoon images, cartoon faces attract researchers. However, existing studies focus mainly on the following aspects, such as image design, role attractiveness and so on. Those directed at processing mechanism are relatively less.In this research, with cartoon pictures as stimuli, the author tried to compare the difference of eye-movement in different tasks by giving three different processing tasks to the5-6-year-old children. The research was carried out with three experiments:1) cartoon face recognition. Children were required to judge whether a cartoon picture is a face while the influence on the eye movement of faces and non-faces was examined;2) cartoon face classification. Children were required to judge whether a cartoon face belongs to a human or an animal, while the influence on the eye movement of human faces and animal face was examined;3) attraction evaluation of cartoon face. Children were required to tell whether they like a cartoon face or not, while the influence on the eye movement of highly attractive and low attractive faces was examined.Considering the recognition level of children, the first task comes down to the early recognition of the whole structure of the face, which was the most simple; The second task requires further analysis based on the recognition of the whole face, which was a little more difficult; The third task requires comprehensive analysis of the proportion of the five sense organs, the fine features of the important component of the face, so that final evaluation can be made, which was the most difficult. It can be clearly seen that the difficulty of three tasks was progressively increased. It means that, in these three tasks, more and more psychological resources were needed as the difficulty of tasks gradually increased, which possibly involved the speed of processing, the depth of processing, the span of attention, or the complexity of mental activity. Therefore, on the basis of the three sub-experiments, comprehensive analysis was designed with the key point of the difficulty of task. It aimed to compare the young children’s processing characteristics of eye-movement to the cartoon face in tasks of different difficulty. The results showed that,1. When children distinguished between cartoon faces and non-faces, advantages were showed in performance and eye-movement indexes in cartoon face recognition.2. When children distinguished between faces of cartoon people and animals, the former had an advantage while the latter showed characteristics as a novel stimulus, with lower processing speed, deeper processing and more difficulty.3. When children evaluated the level of attractiveness of cartoon faces, there was a preference to attractive faces when children were evaluating the faces of cartoon people, but the phenomenon did not exist in cartoon animals evaluation. At the same time, a tendency to avoid is showed to those unattractive people’s faces.4. Processing of cartoon faces of young children is affected by task situation. With the difficulty of tasks gradually increasing, the processing degree deepened accordingly.5. The processing methods of cartoon faces in three tasks are unanimous, varied degrees of attention was paid to different parts of the face:special attention was paid to the nose at the preliminary stage of processing, and then, more psychological resources were consumed in the area of eyes, followed by nose, mouth, forehead and cheeks, with the chin scarcely concerned over.6. Significant gender difference between boys and girls was showed in the task of cartoon face classification. Girls had the advantage in speed, and boys were more proactive in searching for critical information.