Attentional capture and hold: the oculomotor correlates of the change detection advantage for faces

Abstract

The present study investigated the influence of semantic information on overt attention. Semantic influence on attentional capture and hold mechanisms was explored by measuring oculomotor correlates of the reaction time (RT) and accuracy advantage for faces in the change detection task. We also examined whether the face advantage was due to mandatory processing of faces or an idiosyncratic strategy by participants, by manipulating preknowledge of the object category in which to expect a change. An RT and accuracy advantage was found for detecting changes in faces compared to other objects of less social and biological significance, in the form of greater attentional capture and hold. The faster attentional capture by faces appeared to overcompensate for the longer hold, to produce faster and more accurate manual responses. Preknowledge did not eliminate the face advantage, suggesting that faces receive mandatory processing when competing for attention with stimuli of less sociobiological salience.

A short-lived face alert during inhibition of return

“…These results indicate that faces did not preferentially capture or hold attention over sociobiologically neutral object cues, a result that-although consistent with some previous research (e.g., Stoyanova et al, 2007;Taylor & Therrien, 2005)-is inconsistent with other findings (Bindemann et al, 2007;Theeuwes & Van der Stigchel, 2006;Weaver & Lauwereyns, 2011). Particularly interesting in the present findings was the lack of evidence for an influence of cue content on hold processes of exogenous orienting (Fox et al, 2001;Fox et al, 2002;Stolz, 1996).…”

“…Evidence from single-cell recordings (e.g., Perrett, Hietanen, Oram, & Benson, 1992) and neuroimaging (e.g., Clark et al, 1996;Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997;Sergent & Signoret, 1992) indicates the highly specialized nature in which faces are processed (Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000). Further attesting to their status as a special stimulus, evidence of attentional priority for faces has been observed across a range of behavioral paradigms, including visual search (e.g., Ro, Friggel, & Lavie, 2007), spatial cuing (e.g., Bindemann, Burton, Langton, Schweinberger, & Doherty, 2007;Theeuwes & Van der Stigchel, 2006), flicker (Ro, Russell, & Lavie, 2001;Weaver & Lauwereyns, 2011), go/no-go (e.g., Bindemann, Burton, Hooge, Jenkins, & de Haan, 2005), and inattentional blindness paradigms (e.g., Devue, Laloyaux, Feyers, Theeuwes, & Brédart, 2009;Mack & Rock, 1998).…”

Social targets improve body-based and environment-based strategies during spatial navigation

“…Whereas the bias reduction in experiment 1 may therefore be explained by the general tendency to perceive a person facing oneself as more close than a person looking away (Jung et al 2016), and perhaps as more close than the object used here, there was no bias reduction but still a reduction in position error in experiment 2, which in our view cannot be explained by such a systematic shift towards the self. Our results may therefore indicate a social advantage in spatial encoding, similar as has been observed in other contexts, such as attentional capture for faces (Weaver and Lauwereyns 2011), attentional capture for social stimuli (Gluckman and Johnson 2013), enhanced tactile spatial perception when seeing a hand (Kennett et al 2001), or a social preference when observing complex scenes (Solyst and Buffalo 2014).…”

“…It has been argued before that visual body perception triggers attentional focus (Weaver and Lauwereyns 2011;Gluckman and Johnson 2013;Solyst and Buffalo 2014), perhaps via attentional prioritization (Truong and Todd 2016). Attentional prioritization also modulates hippocampal networks, and the PPC (Cordova et al 2016;Levichkina et al 2017).…”

Faces are special, but facial expressions aren’t: Insights from an oculomotor capture paradigm

“…Some very salient stimuli, such as flashes of light or colour singletons, can be selected in an automatic fashion without intention to look for them (Theeuwes, 1992;Theeuwes, Kramer, Hahn, & Irwin, 1998). In a recent study, we provided eye-tracking evidence that faces, which are much more complex, can also capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner, even if they are presented peripherally and are completely irrelevant to the task (Devue, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012; see also Laidlaw, Badiudeen, Zhu, & Kingstone, 2015;Weaver & Lauwereyns, 2011).…”