Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: The ability to recognize and respond quickly to visual signals of threat is critical for survival. Threatening faces are hypothesized to capture visual attention more rapidly than nonthreatening faces. This experiment tested the perceptual conformity hypothesis, which predicts that attention differences elicited by threatening vs. nonthreatening faces depend on whether the inner facial features follow the curvature of the outer facial surround. In a pre-experimental study, 38 participants rated the affect of stimuli with and without a facial surround. These ratings determined the stimuli for an experimental flankers task, which was completed by 35 different participants. Flanker displays included compatible and incompatible trials, in which flanker stimuli, if responded to, would or would not have the same response as the centrally-located targets. The flankers experiment examined a) whether emotionally neutral surround-present and surround-absent stimuli, containing conforming and nonconforming inner lines, generated the flanker-effect asymmetries that have been reported for angry vs. happy faces; and b) whether incompatible flankers with nonconforming inner lines would generate more response interference than those with conforming inner lines, in both surround conditions. No flanker-effect asymmetry or difference in response interference were obtained for either surround condition. For surround-present trials, reaction times were significantly faster to targets with conforming inner lines than to those with nonconforming inner lines, and to compatible as opposed to incompatible trials. For surround-absent trials, participants responded faster to compatible trials, and there were no reaction time differences between targets with conforming and nonconforming inner lines. The results are not consistent with the perceptual conformity hypothesis. One potential reason is that perceptual conformity may not account for the reported attention distribution differences to threatening vs. nonthreatening faces. Some other perceptual feature may explain previously documented flanker-effect asymmetries, or facial affect may override perceptual contributions to these asymmetries. Such interpretations are clouded, however, by the inconclusive and potentially confounded extant literature and the scant evidence for the flanker-effect asymmetry based on facial threat. Assuming the validity of the reported attention differences, future research is needed to elucidate the attributes that consistently elicit such differences for targets that convey specific categories of emotion.
Author: April Gibbs Scott
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2232166864