We assessed individual differences in visual attention toward faces in relation to their attractiveness via saccadic reaction times. Motivated by the aim to understand individual differences in attention to faces, we tested three hypotheses: (a) Attractive faces hold or capture attention more effectively than less attractive faces; (b) men show a stronger bias toward attractive opposite-sex faces than women; and (c) blue-eyed men show a stronger bias toward blue-eyed than brown-eyed feminine faces. The latter test was included because prior research suggested a high effect size. Our data supported hypotheses (a) and (b) but not (c). By conducting separate tests for disengagement of attention and attention capture, we found that individual differences exist at distinct stages of attentional processing but these differences are of varying robustness and importance. In our conclusion, we also advocate the use of linear mixed effects models as the most appropriate statistical approach for studying inter-individual differences in visual attention with naturalistic stimuli.

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Eye fixations allow the human viewer to perceive scene content with high acuity. If fixations drive visual memory for scenes, a viewer might repeat his/her previous fixation pattern during recognition of a familiar scene. However, visual salience alone could account for similarities between two successive fixation patterns by attracting the eyes in a stimulus-driven, task-independent manner. In the present study, we tested whether the viewer's aim to recognize a scene fosters fixations on scene content that repeats from learning to recognition as compared to the influence of visual salience alone. In Experiment 1 we compared the gaze behavior in a recognition task to that in a free-viewing task. By showing the same stimuli in both tasks, the task-independent influence of salience was held constant. We found that during a recognition task, but not during (repeated) free viewing, viewers showed a pronounced preference for previously fixated scene content. In Experiment 2 we tested whether participants remembered visual input that they fixated during learning better than salient but nonfixated visual input. To that end we presented participants with smaller cutouts from learned and new scenes. We found that cutouts featuring scene content fixated during encoding were recognized better and faster than cutouts featuring nonfixated but highly salient scene content from learned scenes. Both experiments supported the hypothesis that fixations during encoding and maybe during recognition serve visual memory over and above a stimulus-driven influence of visual salience.

Visual prime stimuli can affect the processing of following target stimuli even if their visibility is reduced due to visual masking. Prime visibility depends on the stimulus parameters of the prime and those of the mask. Here we explored the effects of prime stimuli and modulated their visibility by continuous flash suppression (CFS). CFS reduces the visibility of a stimulus presented to one eye by simultaneously presenting a series of high-contrast masking stimuli to the other eye.We manipulated the strength of CFS effects on perception and examined how action priming effects of the masked stimuli varied under the same conditions. Prime visibility was modulated by the contrast of the primes (Experiments 1 and 2), the contrast of the masks (Experiments 2 and 3), and by the stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target stimuli (all experiments). Surprisingly, action priming effects were modulated by these experimental variables in a parallel way. In addition, individual differences between participants in prime visibility correlated with individual differences in action priming. Our findings suggest that action priming and prime perception depend in similar ways on prime contrast, mask contrast, stimulus onset asynchrony, and individual dispositions in CFS.These findings distinguish CFS from other perceptual suppression techniques, such as backward masking, that allow reducing prime visibility without parallel effects on action priming. Our results corroborate the view that CFS interferes with visual processing at early stages in the cortical hierarchy with similar effects on later processing for perception and action.