Do faces capture attention in a bottom-up fashion? An eye-movement study

Due to their high social and biological significance, faces should be able to capture attention in a bottom-up fashion. Accordingly, a recent visual search study showed that the presence of an upright distractor face slows down the search for a butterfly target while the presence of a butterfly distractor does not affect the search for a target face (Langton et al., 2008). To further test whether upright faces automatically capture attention we recorded eye movements during a cued target search task. We show that when the search alternates between a face and a butterfly target (Experiment 1), faces are found faster and with less saccades than butterflies. The presence of the opposite distractor within the display (e.g. a face during a butterfly search) slows down the search but to a higher extent when the distractor is a face. Similarly, faces capture the eyes more frequently than butterflies. In a control experiment inverted face targets were also found more efficiently than inverted butterfly targets and captured the eyes more frequently than butterflies when presented as distractors (Experiment 2). However, when upright or inverted faces were always presented as irrelevant distractors (Experiment 3), we could not found any sign of disruption caused by their presence during a search for butterfly or flower targets. These results challenge the view that faces capture attention automatically. Rather, they suggest that faces only attract attention when their processing is relevant during the search task and that they can otherwise be ignored.