This poster presents preliminary findings from a preregistered EEG study investigating how different forms of eye occlusion influence the neural processing of facial expressions. Specifically, the study compares closed eyes, a natural and potentially expressive eye state, with sunglasses, an artificial form of visual occlusion.Twenty-nine participants viewed faces displaying fearful, happy, or neutral expressions with open eyes, closed eyes, or sunglasses and identified the expressed emotion. Stimuli were selected from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database and matched for luminance. The final samples comprised 28 participants for behavioural analyses and 23 for EEG analyses. Event-related potential analyses focused on the N170, early posterior negativity (EPN), and late positive potential (LPP). Complementary whole-scalp analyses examined global field power and scalp topography.Eye visibility modulated the N170 and early whole-scalp configuration, with sunglasses differentiated from open and closed eyes. This suggests that early face processing distinguishes artificial occlusion from natural eye states. Emotional expressions modulated the N170, EPN, global field power, and scalp configuration. However, no reliable Eyes × Emotion interaction emerged, the preregistered LPP contrast was not significant, and microstate duration, occurrence, and coverage showed no condition effects after correction for multiple comparisons.Overall, the preliminary findings indicate that the nature of eye occlusion influences early perceptual processing, whereas the processing of emotional content remains comparatively robust across eye-visibility conditions. Additional data will be collected to reach the preregistered EEG sample size of 25 participants.