We investigated how aesthetics guides our exploration of the environment. We embedded attractive and nonattractive faces into complex, real-world scenes and measured eye movements during scene viewing. We examined whether attractive faces would elicit longer looks, which would suggest that the aesthetic response orients people toward the rewarding and pleasing aspects of the environment. Experiment 1 showed that mean fixation, mean first fixation, and total fixation durations were longer to attractive faces, and fixations were longest to female faces and by female perceivers. In Experiment 2, we examined whether these effects of attractiveness are sensitive to situational factors. When perceivers were subjected to a threat or social approach manipulation prior to viewing the scenes, we confirmed specific hypotheses concerning the two manipulations. In accordance with the hypothesis that males have higher aggression potential than females, there were no differences in fixation durations between attractive and nonattractive male faces in the threat condition. On the other hand, in the social approach condition, both female and male attractive faces received longer looks. These results suggest that the aesthetic response orients people not only to the pleasing aspects of their environment, but also to those features that are adaptively relevant.

Altogether, the results support the conclusion that awareness of visual primes is important for controlling conflict in visuo-motor processing.

The boundary paradigm, in combination with parafoveal masks, is the main technique for studying parafoveal preprocessing during reading. The rationale is that the masks (e.g., strings of X's) prevent parafoveal preprocessing, but do not interfere with foveal processing. A recent study, however, raised doubts about the neutrality of parafoveal masks. In the present study, we explored this issue by means of fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs). Two FRP conditions presented rows of five words. The task of the participant was to judge whether the final word of a list was a “new” word, or whether it was a repeated (i.e., “old”) word. The critical manipulation was that the final word was X-masked during parafoveal preview in one condition, whereas another condition presented a valid preview of the word. In two additional event-related brain potential (ERP) conditions, the words were presented serially with no parafoveal preview available; in one of the conditions with a fixed timing, in the other word presentation was self-paced by the participants. Expectedly, the valid-preview FRP condition elicited the shortest processing times. Processing times did not differ between the two ERP conditions indicating that “cognitive readiness” during self-paced processing can be ruled out as an alternative explanation for differences in processing times between the ERP and the FRP conditions. The longest processing times were found in the X-mask FRP condition indicating that parafoveal X-masks interfere with foveal word recognition.

In two experiments, we tested whether subliminal abrupt onset cues capture attention in a stimulus-driven way. An onset cue was presented 16 ms prior to the stimulus display that consisted of clearly visible color targets. The onset cue was presented either at the same side as the target (the valid cue condition) or on the opposite side of the target (the invalid cue condition). Because the onset cue was presented 16 ms before other placeholders were presented, the cue was subliminal to the participant. To ensure that this subliminal cue captured attention in a stimulus-driven way, the cue's features did not match the top-down attentional control settings of the participants: (1) The color of the cue was always different than the color of the non-singleton targets ensuring that a top-down set for a specific color or for a singleton would not match the cue, and (2) colored targets and distractors had the same objective luminance (measured by the colorimeter) and subjective lightness (measured by flicker photometry), preventing a match between the top-down set for target and cue contrast. Even though a match between the cues and topdown settings was prevented, in both experiments, the cues captured attention, with faster response times in valid than invalid cue conditions (Experiments 1 and 2) and faster response times in valid than the neutral conditions (Experiment 2). The results support the conclusion that subliminal cues capture attention in a stimulus-driven way.

In the current study, we investigated whether visual salience attracts attention in a bottom-up manner. We presented abstract and depictive paintings as well as photographs to naïve participants in free-viewing (Experiment 1) and target-search (Experiment 2) tasks. Image salience was computed in terms of local feature contrasts in color, luminance, and orientation. Based on the theories of stimulus-driven salience effects on attention and fixations, we expected salience effects in all conditions and a characteristic short-lived temporal profile of the salience-driven effect on fixations. Our results confirmed the predictions. Results are discussed in terms of their potential implications.