Abstract
In three experiments, we tested whether the amount of attentional resources needed to process a face displaying neutral/angry/fearful facial expressions with direct or averted gaze depends on task instructions, and face presentation. To this end, we used a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation paradigm in which participants in Experiment 1 were first explicitly asked to discriminate whether the expression of a target face (T1) with direct or averted gaze was angry or neutral, and then to judge the orientation of a landscape (T2). Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 except that participants had to discriminate the gender of the face of T1 and fearful faces were also presented randomly inter-mixed within each block of trials. Experiment 3 differed from Experiment 2 only because angry and fearful faces were never presented within the same block. The findings indicated that the presence of the attentional blink (AB) for face stimuli depends on specific combinations of gaze direction and emotional facial expressions and crucially revealed that the contextual factors (e.g., explicit instruction to process the facial expression and the presence of other emotional faces) can modify and even reverse the AB, suggesting a flexible and more contextualized deployment of attentional resources in face processing.
Highlights
It is well-documented that facial expression and gaze direction interact to signal to the perceiver the self-relevance of the seen face[7,8,9] and to modulate the deployment of attentional resources[10,11,12]
The results showed no attentional blink effect only when T1 was an angry face with direct gaze, whereas the AB effect was present for angry faces with averted gaze, or neutral faces with either averted or direct gaze
As well as finding that angry faces with direct gaze in T2 were detected more frequently than angry faces with averted gaze, it was found that fearful faces presented in T2 were detected more frequently when they displayed an averted gaze than when they displayed a direct gaze, complementing the results found in the study by Ricciardelli et al.[12] in which only neutral and angry facial expressions were combined with direct and averted gaze
Summary
It is well-documented that facial expression and gaze direction interact to signal to the perceiver the self-relevance of the seen face[7,8,9] and to modulate the deployment of attentional resources[10,11,12]. More generally and in line with the assumption in appraisal theories that an emotional stimulus involves “changes in a number of organismic subsystems or components”[25], the affective meaning of the face may be based on the evaluation of the environment and the observer-environment interaction and may depend on several contextual factors (or cues) These contextual factors may affect the allocation of attentional resources and/or change the perceived affective meaning of the seen face. In contrast to Milders et al.’s11 and to Ricciardelli et al.’s12 study, in which the processing of the facial expression was implicit since participants were instructed to discriminate the gender of the face appearing in T1, de Jong and colleagues[10] explicitly asked participants to identify the emotional expression of the presented face The latter found that the attentional blink was relatively large when angry faces were presented as T1, suggesting that a potential social threat holds attention. In the light of the evidence reported above it could well be the case that the perceived threatening value of a face stimulus, and the attentional demands required to process it, may vary depending on the task instructions
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