Personally and emotionally meaningful information (e.g., one's own name) has shown to capture attention. The question we studied was whether an image of a familiar face draws attention even though it is not expected, and it appears when the focus of attention is directed to other stimuli. Observers' task was to compare two faces and report whether they were identical or left-right reversed. In addition to these faces, a matrix of 'background' faces was displayed. On noncritical trials, the matrix consisted of unfamiliar faces. On critical trials (in about every eighth trial) either an observer's own face or President Ahtisaari's face was displayed. Reaction time was nearly identical on the critical and uncritical trials. On the recognition test about half of the observers were certain that they had seen their own faces in the first part of the experiment. When explicitly asked, however, only three of 26 observers reported that they had recognized their own faces during the comparison task.
Although we can selectively attend to colour, preknowledge of the location of a target has been shown to facilitate visual selection more than preknowledge of the target colour. Here the effects of peripheral flash cues and central colour cues were compared in three experiments. A novel colour-cuing procedure was used in which the target location was designated in advance by colour. Since variations in stimulus eccentricity and density similarly affected performance in both conditions, the colour cues presumably also made it possible to direct attention quickly to the target location. Thus, the colour cues in this study were analogous to symbolic location cues, such as central digits. Moreover, even though peripheral colour information was provided in experiments 1 and 2 only 84 ms before stimulus array, ie at the same time as the onset cue was flashed on, the effect of colour cues was comparable to that of peripheral flashes. This is a surprising finding given previous data on the time to interpret symbolic location cues and to allocate attention to the target location.
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