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The Time-Course for the Capture and Hold of Visuospatial Attention by Fearful and Happy Faces

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Abstract

Fearful faces both capture our attention and hold it. However, little is known about the time-course for the capture and hold of spatial attention by fearful, and other emotional, faces. In three dot-probe studies we examined this time-course. Experiments 1 and 2 used fearful and neutral faces. In Experiment 1, dot-probe targets occurred 133, 266, and 532 ms post-face onset and in Experiment 2, dot-probe targets occurred 84, 168, 336, and 672 ms post-face onset. In Experiment 1, for both 133 and 266 ms conditions, reaction times were fastest for congruent trials and slowest for incongruent trials with reaction times for baseline trials falling between the two. The same pattern was found for the 84 and 168 ms conditions in Experiment 2. For the later time-points in both experiments there were no significant differences between conditions. To examine whether this time-course is unique to fearful faces, a third dot-probe experiment using time-points identical to Experiment 2 was conducted with happy and neutral faces. The results from Experiment 3 suggest that happy faces captured and held attention in the 168 and 336 ms conditions. Together, the results indicate that attention is captured and held by fearful faces at times earlier than approximately 300 ms, while happy faces also captured and held attention, but on a slightly different time-course from 168 to 336 ms.

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Notes

  1. Faces were presented for the same duration (i.e., 133 ms) in all SOA conditions in order to hold the amount of face processing constant across conditions.

  2. Although this may at first glance appear to be a case of circular analysis, it is not circular. A circular analysis is one in which data are reduced based on meeting a particular criterion and then this criterion is tested in the reduced dataset. Here, data are being reduced based on the difference between two conditions (A and B; i.e., congruent and incongruent trials) and are then used in independent comparisons to a third condition (C; baseline trials) and not each other. The difference between A and B (e.g., if A = 350 and B = 400, A < B) has no bearing on whether or not C is different from A or B (e.g., if C = 325, C < A & B; if C = 375, C > A, but < B; or C = 425, C > A & B).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the students in the Cognitive × Affective Behavior and Integrative Neuroscience (CABIN) lab at Northern Michigan University for assisting in the collection of this data.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, 1401 Presque Isle Avenue, Marquette, MI, 49855, USA

    Robert D. Torrence, Erin Wylie & Joshua M. Carlson

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  1. Robert D. Torrence
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  2. Erin Wylie
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  3. Joshua M. Carlson
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Correspondence to Joshua M. Carlson.

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Torrence, R.D., Wylie, E. & Carlson, J.M. The Time-Course for the Capture and Hold of Visuospatial Attention by Fearful and Happy Faces. J Nonverbal Behav 41, 139–153 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-016-0247-7

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