Abstract
Using a priming paradigm, we investigate whether socially important faces are processed preferentially compared to other familiar and unfamiliar faces, and whether any such effects are affected by changes in viewpoint. Participants were primed with frontal images of personally familiar, famous or unfamiliar faces, and responded to target images of congruent or incongruent identity, presented in frontal, three quarter or profile views. We report that participants responded significantly faster to socially important faces (a friend’s face) compared to other highly familiar (famous) faces or unfamiliar faces. Crucially, responses to famous and unfamiliar faces did not differ. This suggests that, when presented in the context of a socially important stimulus, socially unimportant familiar faces (famous faces) are treated in a similar manner to unfamiliar faces. This effect was not tied to viewpoint, and priming did not affect socially important face processing differently to other faces.
Highlights
Attention biases in face perception have long been a topic of interest
We suggest that when participants are presented with a paradigm which includes familiar famous faces, personally familiar faces and unfamiliar faces, they primarily make classification decisions based on the social importance of the face, rather than mere familiarity
We report a robust effect of preferential processing for socially important faces when included in a paradigm with socially unimportant familiar faces and unfamiliar faces
Summary
Focus has turned to whether there are special attention biases related to socially important stimuli. Keyes and Dlugokencka [1] report that socially important personally familiar faces can automatically recruit our attention when presented outside the direct focus of attention. We showed that when a friend’s face is presented peripherally to a central task, it can cause an automatic distraction. This was not the case for unfamiliar faces, or for a participant’s own face. Devue and Brédart [2] showed that personally familiar faces (a participant’s own face and a friend’s face) selectively capture attention compared with unfamiliar faces. No studies to date have attempted to isolate the effect of personal
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