General and own-species attentional face biases
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General and own-species attentional face biases Krisztina V. Jakobsen 1
&
Cassidy White 1 & Elizabeth A. Simpson 2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Humans demonstrate enhanced processing of human faces compared with animal faces, known as own-species bias. This bias is important for identifying people who may cause harm, as well as for recognizing friends and kin. However, growing evidence also indicates a more general face bias. Faces have high evolutionary importance beyond conspecific interactions, as they aid in detecting predators and prey. Few studies have explored the interaction of these biases together. In three experiments, we explored processing of human and animal faces, compared with each other and to nonface objects, which allowed us to examine both own-species and broader face biases. We used a dot-probe paradigm to examine human adults’ covert attentional biases for task-irrelevant human faces, animal faces, and objects. We replicated the own-species attentional bias for human faces relative to animal faces. We also found an attentional bias for animal faces relative to objects, consistent with the proposal that faces broadly receive privileged processing. Our findings suggest that humans may be attracted to a broad class of faces. Further, we found that while participants rapidly attended to human faces across all cue display durations, they attended to animal faces only when they had sufficient time to process them. Our findings reveal that the dot-probe paradigm is sensitive for capturing both own-species and more general face biases, and that each has a different attentional signature, possibly reflecting their unique but overlapping evolutionary importance. Keywords Dot-probe paradigm . Visual attention . General face template . Face perception
Faces are socially and biologically relevant, with clear evolutionary importance (e.g., Öhman, 1993; Stoyanova, Pratt, & Anderson, 2007). Face perception—the ability to readily detect and interpret facial information—is one of humans’ most advanced visual skills, developmentally foundational for social learning and interpersonal skills (Mondloch et al., 2013; Theeuwes & Van der Stigchel, 2006). Not surprisingly, human faces rapidly capture and hold attention even within complex and dynamic environments (Crouzet, Kirchner, & Thorpe, 2010; Fletcher-Watson, Findlay, Leekam, & Benson, 2008; Hershler, Golan, Bentin, & Hochstein, 2010; Hershler & Hochstein, 2005; Simpson, Husband, Yee, Fullerton, & Jakobsen, 2014b). Efficient human face detection occurs even when faces are task irrelevant, suggesting such processing may be automatic (Cerf,
* Krisztina V. Jakobsen [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA
2
Department of Psychology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA
Harel, Einhäuser, & Koch, 2008; Langton, Law, Burton, & Schweinberger, 2008; Simpson, Husband, et al., 2014b). For example, when participants were asked to search for a target object (e.g., car or butterfly) among an
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