Laidlaw Kaitlin E W, Kingstone Alan
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2017 Feb;173:55-65. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.11.009. Epub 2016 Dec 22.
When looking at images of faces, people will often focus their fixations on the eyes. It has previously been demonstrated that the eyes convey important information that may improve later facial recognition. Whether this advantage requires that the eyes be fixated, or merely attended to covertly (i.e. while looking elsewhere), is unclear from previous work. While attending to the eyes covertly without fixating them may be sufficient, the act of using overt attention to fixate the eyes may improve the processing of important details used for later recognition. In the present study, participants were shown a series of faces and, in Experiment 1, asked to attend to them normally while avoiding looking at either the eyes or, as a control, the mouth (overt attentional avoidance condition); or in Experiment 2 fixate the center of the face while covertly attending to either the eyes or the mouth (covert attention condition). After the first phase, participants were asked to perform an old/new face recognition task. We demonstrate that a) when fixations to the eyes are avoided during initial viewing then subsequent face discrimination suffers, and b) covert attention to the eyes alone is insufficient to improve face discrimination performance. Together, these findings demonstrate that fixating the eyes provides an encoding advantage that is not availed by covert attention alone.
在观看人脸图像时，人们通常会将注视点集中在眼睛上。此前已有研究表明，眼睛传达的重要信息可能会提高后续的面部识别能力。然而，从以往的研究中尚不清楚这种优势是需要注视眼睛，还是仅仅暗中关注（即看向其他地方时）即可。虽然不注视眼睛而暗中关注可能就足够了，但使用明显的注意力去注视眼睛的行为可能会改善对用于后续识别的重要细节的处理。在本研究中，向参与者展示了一系列人脸，在实验1中，要求他们正常关注人脸，同时避免看向眼睛或作为对照的嘴巴（明显注意力回避条件）；或者在实验2中，注视人脸中心，同时暗中关注眼睛或嘴巴（暗中注意力条件）。在第一阶段之后，要求参与者执行一项旧/新人脸识别任务。我们证明：a）在初始观看时避免注视眼睛会使后续的面部辨别能力受损；b）仅暗中关注眼睛不足以提高面部辨别能力。总之，这些发现表明，注视眼睛能提供一种编码优势，而仅靠暗中关注是无法获得这种优势的。
