The capture of attention and gaze in the search for emotional photographic faces

Abstract

ABSTRACTCan emotional expressions automatically attract attention in virtue of their affective content? Previous studies mostly used emotional faces (e.g., angry or happy faces) in visual search tasks to assess whether affective contents can automatically attract attention. However, the evidence in support of affective attentional capture is still contentious, as the studies either: (1) did not render affective contents irrelevant to the task, (2) used affective stimuli that were perceptually similar to the target, (3) did not rule out factors occurring later in the visual search process (e.g., disengagement of attention), or (4) used only schematic emotional faces that do not clearly convey affective contents. The present study remedied these shortcomings by measuring the eye movements of observers while they searched for emotional photographic faces. To examine whether irrelevant emotional faces are selected because of their perceptual similarity to the target (top-down), or because of their emotional expressions, we also assessed the perceptual similarity between the emotional distractors and the target. The results show that happy and angry faces can indeed automatically attract attention and the gaze. Perceptual similarity modulated the effect only weakly, indicating that capture was mainly due to bottom-up, stimulus-driven processes. However, post-selectional processes of disengaging attention from the emotional expressions contributed strongly to the overall disruptive effects of emotional expressions. Taken together, these results support a stimulus-driven account of attentional capture by emotional faces, and highlight the need to use measures that can distinguish between early and late processes in visual search.