When the Eyes Disappear: Neural Dynamics of Emotion Recognition Under Natural vs Artificial Eye Occlusion

This preregistered study examines how reduced visibility of the eye region changes the processing of emotional facial expressions. Although eye occlusion is often treated as a single manipulation, natural eye states (closed eyes) and artificial occlusion (sunglasses) carry different social meanings and may not affect emotion recognition in the same way. Participants will view faces expressing fear, happiness, or neutral affect with open eyes, closed eyes, or sunglasses and will identify the expressed emotion. We will assess behavioural performance and EEG-derived markers of early perceptual encoding, early affective relevance detection, and later evaluative processing to test whether natural and artificial eye occlusion produce dissociable effects across processing stages.