Aya Shirama
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation, 3-1 Morinosato Wakamiya, Atsugi-shi, Kanagawa 243, Japan.
Perception. 2012;41(4):447-59. doi: 10.1068/p7114.
Whether or not a stare in the midst of many faces can guide visual attention is a controversial issue. Two experiments are reported that investigate the hypothesis that visual attention is guided toward a frontal face in the search for a stare among faces with varied head angles. The participants were required to search for a face with a direct gaze in a context where the target could be at any of various head angles and the target's head angle was unpredictable in one trial. The search performance was better for a frontal-face target than for deviated-face targets. Furthermore, eye-movement analyses revealed that a frontal-face stimulus tended to be initially fixated prior to deviated-face stimuli, and many of the initially fixated frontal-face stimuli had an averted gaze. The findings suggest that a frontal face guides overt attention independently of its gaze direction in the search for a stare in a crowd. The validity of prioritising a frontal face in order to find a direct gaze among faces and the characteristics of a human-face detection system are discussed.
在众多面孔中，凝视是否能够引导视觉注意力是一个存在争议的问题。本文报告了两项实验，它们探究了这样一个假设：在寻找不同头部角度面孔中的凝视时，视觉注意力会被引向正脸。要求参与者在一个目标可能处于各种头部角度且在一次试验中目标头部角度不可预测的情境中，寻找直视的面孔。正脸目标的搜索表现优于侧脸目标。此外，眼动分析表明，正脸刺激往往比侧脸刺激更早被初次注视，并且许多初次注视的正脸刺激呈现出回避的目光。研究结果表明，在人群中寻找凝视时，正脸会独立于其注视方向引导外显注意力。本文还讨论了为在面孔中找到直视目光而优先考虑正脸的有效性以及人脸检测系统的特征。
