Abstract
Searching familiar faces in the crowd may involve stimulus-driven attention by emotional significance, together with goal-directed attention due to task-relevant needs. The present study investigated the effect of familiarity on attentional processes by exploring eye fixation-related potentials (EFRPs) and eye gazes when humans searched for, among other distracting faces, either an acquaintance’s face or a newly-learned face. Task performance and gaze behavior were indistinguishable for identifying either faces. However, from the EFRP analysis, after a P300 component for successful search of target faces, we found greater deflections of right parietal late positive potentials in response to newly-learned faces than acquaintance’s faces, indicating more involvement of goal-directed attention in processing newly-learned faces. In addition, we found greater occipital negativity elicited by acquaintance’s faces, reflecting emotional responses to significant stimuli. These results may suggest that finding a familiar face in the crowd would involve lower goal-directed attention and elicit more emotional responses.
Highlights
Suppose that we want to find someone in the crowd whom we have never met before, but know their faces by photos given in advance
We aimed to find whether two groups (AQ and NL) exhibited different neural responses on a familiar face in the visual searching task by comparing the ‘target and NL’ and ‘target and AQ’ conditions and to confirm that the two groups did not have a different strategy for finding faces
We examined whether the correct rate in the target trials was different between the NL and AQ groups in the 1 s period because it could be more challenging to find a target face with less familiarity during a brisk stimulus presentation
Summary
Suppose that we want to find someone in the crowd whom we have never met before, but know their faces by photos given in advance. We will be able to identify the target person by utilizing the newly acquired knowledge, it would be different from the case when we find the face of our acquaintance in the crowd. We would most likely put less effort to find a familiar face than an unfamiliar face. It remains elusive how we devote attention in finding such a familiar face. It is of our interest to understand the roles of different attentional processes in searching for a familiar face among others
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