In 2 experiments, participants were presented schematic faces with emotional expressions (threatening, friendly) in a neutral-faces context or neutral expressions in an emotional-faces context. These conditions were compared with detection performance in displays containing key features of emotional faces not forming the perceptual gestalt of a face. Supporting the notion of a threat detection advantage, Experiment 1 found that threatening faces were faster detected than friendly faces, whereas no difference emerged between the corresponding feature conditions. Experiment 2 increased task difficulty with a backward masking procedure and found corresponding results. In neither of the studies was the threat detection advantage associated with reduced accuracy. However, features were, in general, detected faster than faces when task difficulty was high.

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We carried out three experiments to investigate detection performance in pop-out tasks and analysed how performance varied as a function of display size (number of elements) and retinal eccentricity of the target. Results showed that when display size was increased from 2 to 81 elements performance first decreased and then increased (replicating Sagi and Julesz, 1987 Spatial Vision2 39–49). Performance variations differed as a function of eccentricity and often were more pronounced in the periphery than in the foveal area. This retinal-eccentricity influence suggests that processes underlying detection performance in small display sizes are different from those in large display sizes. One should be careful when using the variation of display size as an instrument to analyse visual-search processes because this analysis could be based on a comparison between non-equivalent conditions.

Although traditionally texture segmentation has been regarded as an automatic, preattentive process, participants confronted with texture segmentation in experimental settings (i.e., with brief presentation time and subsequent masking) are initially unable to perform the task. According to perceptual learning concepts, participants must learn to fine-tune their sensory channels before perception improves under restricted viewing conditions. The present article proposes an alternative perspective that emphasizes the role of the mask. Four experiments showed that the amount of observed learning depends on the structural and temporal homogeneity or heterogeneity of the mask. The authors suggest that learning consists of separating the task-relevant signal stemming from the texture from the task-irrelevant signal of the mask and of ignoring the mask.