Humans have a remarkable capability to respond efficiently to a stimulus of interest despite other stimuli competing for neural resources. The current study investigated how the human system copes with distracting stimuli. During each trial, participants viewed 2 sequential stimuli that were each associated with a specific action based on an arbitrary mapping. The 1st stimulus served as a distractor, and the 2nd stimulus required a response (target). When the distractor preceded the target by more than a few hundred milliseconds, response latencies were slower when the 2 stimuli were associated with the same response. The authors propose that this negative compatibility effect stemmed from an inhibitory mechanism that the human system utilizes to prevent the distractor from eliciting an unwanted response.

Past research indicates that faces can be more difficult to ignore than other types of stimuli. Given the important social and biological relevance of race and gender, the present study examined whether the processing of these facial characteristics is mandatory. Both unfamiliar and famous faces were assessed. Participants made speeded judgments about either the race (Experiment 1) or gender (Experiments 2-4) of a target name under varying levels of perceptual load, while ignoring a flanking distractor face that was either congruent or incongruent with the race/gender of the target name. In general, distractor-target congruency effects emerged when the perceptual load of the relevant task was low but not when the load was high, regardless of whether the distractor face was unfamiliar or famous. These findings suggest that face processing is not necessarily mandatory, and some aspects of faces can be ignored.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract