Abstract
How does the visual system realize dynamic tracking? This topic has become popular within cognitive science in recent years. The classical theory argues that multiple object tracking is accomplished via pre-attention visual indexes as part of a cognitively impenetrable low-level visual system. The present research aimed to investigate whether and how tracking processes are influenced by facial expressions that convey abundant social information about one’s mental state and situated environment. The results showed that participants tracked fearful faces more effectively than neutral faces. However, this advantage was only present under the low-attentional load condition, and distractor face emotion did not impact tracking performance. These findings imply that visual tracking is not driven entirely by low-level vision and encapsulated by high-level representations; rather, that facial expressions, a kind of social information, are able to influence dynamic tracking. Furthermore, the effect of fearful expressions on multiple face tracking is mediated by the availability of attentional resources.
Highlights
Many daily activities require people to track several objects at the same time
The present research manipulated the expressions of both target and distractor faces and attentional load in order to explore the effect of fearful expressions on multiple face tracking
Results indicated that target facial expressions influenced tracking performance within the low-attentional load condition so that both location and identity tracking performance improved when the target wore a fearful expression, as opposed to a neutral expression
Summary
Many daily activities require people to track several objects at the same time. For instance, drivers need to constantly keep track of the movements of other cars in order to avoid collisions. Automatic processing would imply that facial expression processing does not require attentional resources and is not influenced by cognitive control (Anderson, Christoff, Panitz, De Rosa, & Gabrieli, 2003; Esteves, Dimberg, & Öhman, 1994; Öhman, 2002; Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001), while in contrast, the controlled view suggests that the processing of facial expressions is influenced by the extent of available attentional resources (Eimer, Holmes, & McGlone, 2003; Holmes, Vuilleumier, & Eimer, 2003; Pessoa, McKenna, Gutierrez, & Ungerleider, 2002; Pessoa, Padmala, & Morland, 2005) Another aim of the present study was to examine whether attentional resources mediate any effect of fearful expressions on multiple face tracking. Accuracy was computed by measuring the percentage of faces that were correctly located or identified
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