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Attentional capture by completely task-irrelevant faces

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Abstract

The present study investigated whether faces capture attention regardless of attentional set. The presentation of a face as a distractor during a visual search has been shown to impair performance relative to when the face was absent, implying that faces automatically attract attention. If attentional control is contingent on the observer’s current goal, faces should not capture attention when they are irrelevant to the observer’s attentional set. Previous studies demonstrating face-induced attentional capture used faces that were relevant to the task. Thus, a task in which faces were completely irrelevant to the observer’s set was created. Participants identified a target letter among heterogeneously colored non-targets while ignoring a peripheral facial image that appeared as a brief distractor. No face-specific capture was observed when the target-distractor stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was long (Experiment 1). When the SOA was shortened, attentional capture by irrelevant faces was observed (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 extended this finding to all conditions, regardless of the attractiveness of faces. No such capture effect was found in Experiment 4 with inverted-face distractors. These results indicate that completely task-irrelevant faces break through top-down attentional set given a brief distractor-target SOA.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas, “Face perception and recognition” from MEXT KAKENHI 23119731 to JK. We thank Shoko Kanaya for her helpful comments on this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Chukyo University, 101-2 Yagoto, Showa, Nagoya, 466-8666, Japan

    Shiori Sato & Jun I. Kawahara

  2. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan

    Jun I. Kawahara

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  1. Shiori Sato
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  2. Jun I. Kawahara
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Correspondence to Jun I. Kawahara.

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Sato, S., Kawahara, J.I. Attentional capture by completely task-irrelevant faces. Psychological Research 79, 523–533 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0599-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0599-8

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