Looking back at the stare-in-the-crowd effect: Staring eyes do not capture attention in visual search

Abstract

The stare-in-the crowd effect refers to the finding that a visual search for a target of staring eyes among averted-eyes distracters is more efficient than the search for an averted-eyes target among staring distracters. This finding could indicate that staring eyes are prioritized in the processing of the search array so that attention is more likely to be directed to their location than to any other. However, visual search is a complex process, which not only depends upon the properties of the target, but also the similarity between the target of the search and the distractor items and between the distractor items themselves. Across five experiments, we show that the search asymmetry diagnostic of the stare-in-the-crowd effect is more likely to be the result of a failure to control for the similarity among distracting items between the two critical search conditions rather than any special attention-grabbing property of staring gazes. Our results suggest that, contrary to results reported in the literature, staring gazes are not prioritized by attention in visual search.

Look at them and they will notice you: Distractor-independent attentional capture by direct gaze in change blindness

“…Direct gaze, thus, seems to break into consciousness faster than averted gaze also when considering change detection. These results repeat the original stare-in-the-crowd effect observed for visual search (e.g., Cooper et al, 2013;von Grünau & Anston, 1995) for change blindness.…”

“…As in Cooper et al (2013), Experiment 1 was aimed as a repetition of the original stare-in-the-crowd effect (Experiment 1; von Grünau & Anston, 1995) to confirm that our stimulus setup works similarly to previous studies. We used a corresponding composition of gaze direction stimuli as in the experiment by von Grünau and Anston (1995), but adapted to the change blindness paradigm.…”

“…In other words, the context comprising the distractor stimulus array can both disrupt and facilitate target detection. Cooper et al (2013) found no evidence for the stare-in-the-crowd effect in the visual search paradigm when these contextual confounding factors were controlled for. It is possible that this paradigm is particularly prone to this problem, since it is based on deviance detection, i.e., the target is the sole deviant item in the search array, and deviant detection is based on comparison of that item to all of the distractor items.…”

“…There is also recent evidence from studies using the visual search paradigm suggesting that direct gaze is not necessarily prioritized by detection alone, but the findings more likely reflect the attention-grabbing potential of the distractor stimuli across different search conditions (Cooper, Law, & Langton, 2013). For example, when the distractor context was identicaluniform or heterogeneous-the detection of direct and averted gaze deviants were equally efficient.…”

“…To this end, we conducted a series of three change blindness experiments in which we systematically manipulated the gaze distractor background, similarly to Cooper et al's (2013) study, which used the stare-inthe-crowd visual search paradigm. In Experiments 1-3, we used a uniform background with distractor faces displaying an opposite gaze direction to the target (direct or laterally averted gaze, Experiment 1), an identical distractor background for both conditions (all distractors displaying an upward or downcast gaze, Experiment 2), and a heterogeneous background (two distractor faces displaying a direct and two displaying a laterally averted gaze, Experiment 3).…”