Bindemann Markus, Burton A Mike, Langton Stephen R H, Schweinberger Stefan R, Doherty Martin J
Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
J Vis. 2007 Jul 27;7(10):15.1-8. doi: 10.1167/7.10.15.
Humans attend to faces. This study examines the extent to which attention biases to faces are under top-down control. In a visual cueing paradigm, observers responded faster to a target probe appearing in the location of a face cue than of a competing object cue (Experiments 1a and 2a). This effect could be reversed when faces were negatively predictive of the likely target location, making it beneficial to attend to the object cues (Experiments 1b and 2b). It was easier still to strategically shift attention to predictive face cues (Experiment 2c), indicating that the endogenous allocation of attention was augmented here by an additional effect. However, faces merely delayed the voluntary deployment of attention to object cues, but they could not prevent it, even at short cue-target intervals. This finding suggests that attention biases for faces can be rapidly countered by an observer's endogenous control.
人类会关注面部。本研究考察了对面部的注意偏向受自上而下控制的程度。在视觉线索范式中，观察者对出现在面部线索位置的目标探测刺激的反应比对竞争物体线索位置的目标探测刺激的反应更快（实验1a和2a）。当面部对可能的目标位置具有负面预测性时，这种效应可能会逆转，此时关注物体线索会更有利（实验1b和2b）。将注意力策略性地转移到预测性面部线索上则更容易（实验2c），这表明在此处注意力的内源性分配因额外的效应而增强。然而，面部仅仅延迟了对物体线索的注意力的自愿部署，但即使在短线索 - 目标间隔下，也无法阻止这种部署。这一发现表明，观察者的内源性控制可以迅速抵消对面部的注意偏向。
