Chen Enguang, Liu Chengdong, Zhang Xinyue, Wang Kuan, Wang Hailing
School of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250358, China.
School of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250358, China.
Biol Psychol. 2025 Jul;199:109060. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2025.109060. Epub 2025 May 29.
In face processing theories, it is commonly proposed that structural and social information of faces are processed through different pathways. Recent research suggests that the type of face processing (i.e., configural/featural) can influence how social information is processed. However, the influence of face processing type on the perception of gaze, a crucial social cue, remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate how task-irrelevant face processing influences attentional selection to gaze. Using a visual search paradigm, the study examined participants' ability to detect direct and averted gaze in arrays of configural or featural faces. The rectangular array was adopted in Experiment 1 and the diamond array was adopted in Experiment 2. Behavioral results of two experiments showed that detecting averted gaze among direct gazes was more efficient than the reverse, particularly in featural faces. The ERP findings showed that task-irrelevant face processing types influence attention selection to gaze in a rectangular array (Experiment 1), but not in a diamond array (Experiment 2). Averted gaze captures more attention than direct gaze in both configural and featural processing when presented in the right visual field, while direct gaze in featural processing exhibits more attentional suppression than averted gaze in the left visual field. Overall, this study underscores the dynamic interplay of different types of information during face perception.
在面部加工理论中，通常认为面部的结构信息和社会信息是通过不同的通路进行加工的。最近的研究表明，面部加工的类型（即整体/局部特征）会影响社会信息的加工方式。然而，面部加工类型对注视感知（一种关键的社会线索）的影响仍不明确。本研究旨在探究与任务无关的面部加工如何影响对注视的注意选择。该研究采用视觉搜索范式，考察了参与者在整体或局部特征面部阵列中检测直接注视和回避注视的能力。实验1采用矩形阵列，实验2采用菱形阵列。两个实验的行为结果表明，在直接注视中检测回避注视比相反情况更有效，尤其是在局部特征面部中。ERP结果表明，与任务无关的面部加工类型会影响在矩形阵列（实验1）中对注视的注意选择，但在菱形阵列（实验2）中则不会。当在右侧视野呈现时，在整体和局部特征加工中，回避注视比直接注视更能吸引注意力，而在左侧视野中，局部特征加工中的直接注视比回避注视表现出更多的注意抑制。总体而言，本研究强调了面部感知过程中不同类型信息的动态相互作用。
