It Takes a Confounded Face to Pop Out of a Crowd

Abstract

It is widely reported that a picture of an angry face seems to figuratively pop out of an array of happy faces, although all of these reports are based on a single experiment by Hansen and Hansen. Pop out, when it occurs, indicates that an observer has located the target by means of a preattentive, parallel search. Hansen and Hansen concluded that it was the affect displayed by the face which caused it to pop out from its surrounding distracters. However, Hansen and Hansen's angry faces contained extraneous dark areas which were introduced when they transformed Ekman and Friesen's photographs of angry and happy faces into black-on-white sketches. When the original artifact-free gray-scaled versions of angry and happy faces were used no evidence for pop out was found. All target faces were found during a serial, self-terminating search regardless of their expression. The angry face in Hansen and Hansen's experiments may have popped out from a crowd of happy faces because of a contrast artifact inadvertently introduced when they created their stimuli.

Posterror speeding after threat-detection failure.

“…The stimuli were generated by following the procedure described by Ceccarini and Caudek (2013). (Becker et al, 2011;Purcell, Stewart, & Skov, 1996). To address thisissue, following the same procedure described by Ceccarini and Caudek (2013), we modified the nine happy face images with the 3dStudio Max software in order to create 3D face models expressing happiness with a closed mouth.…”

Differential attentional guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion

“…By definition, faces expressing different emotions, such as anger and happiness, consist of different composites of features. Given these differences, any evidence showing differential guidance of focal attention by unattended faces expressing different emotions can often be accounted for in terms of the different features, rather than in terms of the different emotions expressed by the faces (e.g., Byrne & Eysenck, 1995;Nothdurft, 1993;Purcell, Stewart, & Skov, 1996;White, 1995).…”

“…In a number of studies, the underlying assumption has been that the only satisfactory evidence that a face guides focal attention is a pattern of findings showing that the speed with which a face is detected is relatively unaffected by the number of distractor faces (e.g., Hampton et al, 1989;Nothdurft, 1993;Purcell et al, 1996;White, 1995). In other words, the slope of the search function across increasing numbers of distractors should be relatively flat.…”

“…The participants were required to indicate the spatial location of the target in each display, to ensure that their attention had in fact been directed to the location of the target (see Smilek et al, 2000). Finally, schematic faces were used to minimize featural differences that might overwhelm any potential guidance of focal attention that was based on affective differences between the target faces (see Nothdurft, 1993;Purcell et al, 1996;White, 1995).…”

Testing location memory for threatening and nonthreatening stimuli : implications for evolutionary psychological theorizing.

“…Although this original research was criticized for methodological reasons (Purcell, Stewart, & Skov, 1996), further research confirmed the finding that threatening faces are detected more rapidly than nonthreatening faces (Becker & Detweiler-Bedell, 2009;Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2001;Fenske & Eastwood, 2003;LoBue, 2009;Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001).…”