Zheng Wenwen, Luo Ting, Hu Chuan-Peng, Peng Kaiping
Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2018 Mar 6;9:286. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00286. eCollection 2018.
A more babyfaced individual is perceived as more child-like and this impression from babyface, as known as babyface effect, has an impact on social life among various age groups. In this study, the influence of babyfaces on visual selective attention was tested by cognitive task, demonstrating that the female babyface and male mature face would draw participants' attention so that they take their eyes off more slowly. In Experiment 1, a detection task was applied to test the influence of babyfaces on visual selective attention. In this experiment, a babyface and a mature face with the same gender were presented simultaneously with a letter on one of them. The reaction time was shorter when the target letter was overlaid with a female babyface or male mature face, suggesting an attention capture effect. To explore how this competition influenced by attentional resources, we conducted Experiment 2 with a spatial cueing paradigm and controlled the attentional resources by cueing validity and inter-stimulus interval. In this task, the female babyface and male mature face prolonged responses to the spatially separated targets under the condition of an invalid and long interval pre-cue. This observation replicated the result of Experiment 1. This indicates that the female babyface and male mature face glued visual selective attention once attentional resources were directed to them. To further investigate the subliminal influence from a babyface, we used continuous flash suppression paradigm in Experiment 3. The results, again, showed the advantage of the female babyfaces and male mature faces: they broke the suppression faster than other faces. Our results provide primary evidence that the female babyfaces and male mature faces can reliably glue the visual selective attention, both supra- and sub-liminally.
长相更显娃娃脸的人被认为更孩子气，而这种源自娃娃脸的印象，即所谓的娃娃脸效应，在各个年龄组的社会生活中都有影响。在本研究中，通过认知任务测试了娃娃脸对视觉选择性注意的影响，结果表明女性娃娃脸和男性成熟脸会吸引参与者的注意力，使他们移开视线的速度更慢。在实验1中，采用检测任务来测试娃娃脸对视觉选择性注意的影响。在该实验中，将一张娃娃脸和一张同性别成熟脸同时呈现，其中一张上面有一个字母。当目标字母叠加在女性娃娃脸或男性成熟脸上时，反应时间更短，这表明存在注意捕获效应。为了探究这种竞争如何受到注意力资源的影响，我们在实验2中采用了空间线索范式，并通过线索有效性和刺激间隔来控制注意力资源。在这个任务中，在无效且长间隔预线索的条件下，女性娃娃脸和男性成熟脸对空间分离目标的反应时间延长。这一观察结果重复了实验1的结果。这表明一旦注意力资源指向它们，女性娃娃脸和男性成熟脸就会吸引视觉选择性注意。为了进一步研究娃娃脸的阈下影响，我们在实验3中使用了连续闪烁抑制范式。结果再次表明了女性娃娃脸和男性成熟脸的优势：它们比其他脸更快地打破抑制。我们的结果提供了初步证据，表明女性娃娃脸和男性成熟脸在阈上和阈下都能可靠地吸引视觉选择性注意。
