Effects of Schematic Face on Attention-spreading

摘要

Attention-spreading refers to the phenomenon that when observers try to restrict attention to a particular part of a display, other parts that belong to the same object are obligatorily facilitated. Previous studies have examined effects of perceptual grouping principles such as adjacency and similarity on this process, and found that a lateralized potential relative to an attended hemi-field at occipital-temporal electrode sites reflects an attention-spreading process. In our study, we employed the rapid presentation of bilateral stimuli paradigm to explore whether or not attention-spreading occurs in response to emotional connectedness (i.e., happy or unhappy face). The results indicated that when presented with schematic face the response pattern was somewhat different from that of physically perceptual connectedness, which suggests that there may be some specific mechanisms underlying spatial integration by face or facial expression.