The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes Effie J. Pereira1 · Elina Birmingham2 · Jelena Ristic1 Received: 17 January 2018 / Accepted: 7 December 2018 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract It is commonly accepted that attention is spontaneously biased towards faces and eyes. However, the role of stimulus features and task settings in this finding has not yet been systematically investigated. Here, we tested if faces and facial features bias attention spontaneously when stimulus factors, task properties, response conditions, and eye movements are controlled. In three experiments, participants viewed face, house, and control scrambled face–house images in an upright and inverted orientation. The task was to discriminate a target that appeared with equal probability at the previous location of the face, house, or the control image. In all experiments, our data indicated no spontaneous biasing of attention for targets occurring at the previous location of the face. Experiment 3, which measured oculomotor biasing, suggested a reliable but infrequent saccadic bias towards the eye region of upright faces. Importantly, these results did not reflect our specific laboratory settings, as in Experiment 4, we present a full replication of a classic finding in the literature demonstrating reliable social attention bias. Together, these data suggest that attentional biasing for social information is task and context mediated, and less robust than originally thought.
Introduction Faces are, perhaps, the most important stimuli that humans encounter in their visual environment, conveying key information for survival, emotional wellbeing, and social function. These aspects of social communication are supported both by the morphology of the human eye, which facilitates an easy reading of social signals due to the high contrast between the iris and the sclera (Campbell, 1957; Kobayashi & Kohshima, 2001), and by the specialized distributed network of brain structures (e.g., fusiform face area, superior temporal sulcus, and occipital face area) that are specifically tuned for the processing of faces, gaze information, and other socio-biological signals (Bentin, Allison, Puce, Perez, & McCarthy, 1996; Gauthier et al., 2000; Haxby et al., 1994; Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006; Nummenmaa & Calder, 2008; Perrett, Hietanen, Oram, Benson, & Rolls, 1992; Perrett et al., 1985; Puce, Allison, Bentin, Gore, & McCarthy, 1998; Yovel, Levy, Grabowecky, * Effie J. Pereira [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, McGill University, 1205 Dr. Penfield Avenue, H3A 1B1 Montreal, QC, Canada
Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby V5A 1S6, BC, Canada
2
& Paller, 2003). These structures are thought to enable basic functions that lead to well-documented face-processing benefits across the lifespan, such as enhanced facial recognition abilities (Little, Jones, & DeBruine, 2011; Thomas, De Bellis, Gra
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