Аннотация:Eye movements play a functional role in facial expression recognition. Some regions of the face may contain more useful information when observing the face, depending on the expression. The question of holistic and analytic processing in facial perception is actively debated. However, less is known about inner mechanisms responsible for specific face-viewing patterns. The present research focuses on the individual mechanisms of facial expression recognition and on the identification of similar eye movement strategies (and their persistence dependent on the type of facial expression). In the facial expression recognition experiment, we analyzed responses andeye tracking data of 94 participants. Photographs of neutral, angry and happy faces from the WSEFEP database were presented separately for 2000 ms. Two extreme groups with different viewing patterns were distinguished according to the following characteristics: the average duration of fixations on the face, the number of fixations. A more detailed analysis showed significant differences in eye movements in areas of interest (eyes, nose and mouth) and revealed a tendency to use a regular sequential pattern of eye movements for the both groups. The first group is characterized by short fixations evenly distributed over three areas of interest and greater variability of the eye movement strategy when comparing neutral and emotional faces. The second group is characterized by a smaller number of fixations of a longer duration and the the use of 1-2 areas of interest while ignoring the mouth area. No significant differences in the fixation duration for the mouth area (in all facial expression) and for the nose area (in happy faces) were found. Founded by RSCF, project number: 19-18-00474