Visual attention is captured by task-irrelevant faces, but not by pareidolia faces

摘要

It has been reported that visual attention is captured exogenously by faces. This study used pareidolia faces and examined whether subjective perception of a face is sufficient for capturing attention or the registry of an actual face is necessary for attentional capture. Three experiments demonstrated that a completely task-irrelevant face distractor captured attention exogenously, in turn disrupting subsequent target identification in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm (Experiment 1). However, the task-irrelevant pareidolia face distractor did not cause attentional capture (Experiment 2), although it was perceived as a face (Experiment 3). Thus, the subjective perception of a task-irrelevant face is insufficient to trigger stimulus-driven attentional capture; the registry of an actual face is necessary for attentional capture. The visual system may have a cognitive mechanism preattentively discriminating actual faces from face-like objects.