ABSTRACT Eye contact often elicits a smiling response. We investigated whether an individual’s awareness that the recipient perceives their direct gaze during eye contact has an influence on this smiling response. Participants wore glasses with either clear or dark lenses (preventing the other person from seeing their eyes). Measurements of electromyographic activity from the zygomatic and periocular muscle regions showed that the smiling responses were greater to seeing the other’s direct versus averted gaze. The participants’ own gaze direction had also an effect, and this effect was modified by the visibility of their eyes. Zygomatic responses were greater when the participants were aware that their eyes were visible. Thus, awareness of sending a direct gaze to another plays a role in the smiling response. In addition, participants’ self-evaluated level of social anxiety was positively correlated with the magnitude of the zygomatic responses to the other person’s direct versus averted gaze.

ABSTRACT Previous studies have found a female advantage in face recognition ability. The present study sought to replicate this finding in a large sample of 343 Danish psychology students using the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and the Cambridge Face Perception Test (CFPT). Furthermore, we examined whether a potential female advantage could be explained by more efficient holistic processing indexed by the face inversion effect: a disproportionately larger effect of inversion on face than object processing (dFIE). Here we used the Cambridge Car Memory Test (CCMT) as the control task with cars as the object category. In accordance with previous studies, the results showed a female advantage in face processing both on the CFMT and the CFPT. No gender difference in the dFIE was found, however, indicating that more efficient holistic processing does not underlie the female advantage in face recognition.

ABSTRACT Luck et al. [(2021). Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949] proposed singleton suppression as a promising resolution to the attention capture debate. Specifically, salient singletons are assumed to generate an “attend-to-me” signal and therefore represent a threat that triggers suppression. One noteworthy limitation is that singleton suppression has been demonstrated only when the singleton has a colour or location that is consistently associated with being a distractor. This raises the important question of whether “singleton” suppression has anything to do with being a singleton. Drawing on our recent work, we propose the alternative view that suppression occurs for colours associated with being distractors, regardless of whether they are also salient.

ABSTRACT Strong evidence supporting the top-down modulation of attention has come from studies in which participants learned to suppress a singleton in a heterogeneous four-item display. These studies have been criticized on the grounds that the displays are so sparse that the singleton is not actually salient. We argue that similar evidence of suppression has been found with substantially larger displays where salience is not in question. Additionally, we examine the results of applying salience models to four-item displays, and find prominent markers of salience at the location of the singleton. We conclude that small heterogeneous displays do not preclude strong salience signals. Beyond that, we reflect on how further basic research on salience may speed resolution of the attentional capture debate.

ABSTRACT Colour often has emotional connotations, with red associated with negativity and green with positivity. Some suggest that these associations automatically influence the categorization of affective stimuli presented in their context. If so, such effects should occur rapidly, remaining robust under temporal constraints. Here we examined whether these associations influence affective judgments about emotionally ambiguous (neutral or surprised) facial expressions when stimulus presentation duration (Experiment 1) or decision time (Experiment 2) is constrained. Faces appearing on red backgrounds were categorized as negative more than those on green or grey backgrounds, regardless of presentation duration or decision time. Faces on green backgrounds were also categorized as positive more than those on grey backgrounds when decision time was constrained. When incongruent with the expressed emotion, background colour also interfered with affective judgments about emotionally unambiguous faces (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest colour associations rapidly impact valence judgments and potentially operate outside participants’ control.

ABSTRACT Luck, Gaspelin, Folk, Remington, & Theeuwes [(in press). Progress Toward Resolving the Attentional Capture Debate. Visual Cognition] proposes that proactive attentional mechanisms suppress a salient distractor by top-down inhibitory signals. However, considering the abundance of distracting information surrounding us, an automatic and passive distractor filtering system that requires little cognitive resources would benefit. Recent studies showed that passive exposure to distractors (without any competition with a target) before a search task attenuates interference from distractors during the actual visual search, called passive distractor filtering, and suggested that habituation is its core mechanism. This commentary summarizes research on passive distractor filtering, discusses habituation processes, and proposes future directions.

ABSTRACT Luck et al. (2021, Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949) propose that proactive suppression can help to resolve the long-standing attentional capture debate. They argue that salient but task-irrelevant stimuli automatically generate a priority signal, which leads to attentional capture if it is not suppressed. While this signal suppression framework provides a refreshing new perspective on attentional capture, it cannot fully resolve this debate. To do this, it would have to be demonstrated that task-contingent capture effects in spatial cueing tasks are linked to proactive feature-based suppression preventing attentional capture by salient but irrelevant objects. I argue that there is little evidence if any evidence for such a link. I consider possible reasons why suppression does not seem to play a major role in spatial cueing tasks, and also highlight important general limitations of proactive inhibitory control in visual search.

ABSTRACT Debate centres on the difficulty to distinguish precisely whether cognitive or perceptual load determines performance in tasks such as the Halford Graphical Relational Complexity Task (HGRCT). In this task, visual information is presented, and participants are asked to perform a series of mental operations that require working memory (WM) to complete the task. This study compared performance on purely visual as well as a cognitive task over arity, defined as the “amount of information to be remembered” and so a measure of working-memory load. Errors increased generally with increasing arity. However, reaction-time (RT) slopes revealed small to moderate increases over arity for the visual task while there was a major increase in the RT slope in the cognitive task. It cannot be ruled out that visual information load increases task difficulty, however, the difference in magnitude of the RT slopes over arity indicates that resolving the HGRCT is mainly dependent upon performance in cognitive mechanisms and may be relatively uninfluenced by the performance of perceptual memory systems.

ABSTRACT The multi-dimensional face-space metaphor has been a powerful explanatory force in face processing. Here, its predictive powers are considered for ratings of attractiveness, distinctiveness and sexual dimorphism using two different actualizations of face-space. One face-space was based on similarity ratings between pairs of faces and the other on facial feature eccentricity, both based on the same set of 200 faces. The two models both gave similar insights into the range of properties tested. Distinctive faces were located further from the center of these multi-dimensional face-spaces than typical faces. Attractiveness of males was linked to averageness within these models whereas for females, averageness had little effect on their attractiveness. Femininity was a better predictor of female face attractiveness, but masculinity showed a curvilinear relationship with the attractiveness of male faces. Together, these findings demonstrate the usefulness of the face-space metaphor in exploring ideas of the distinctiveness, attractiveness and the sexual dimorphism of faces.

ABSTRACTIn the literature, a well-known processing advantage for angry schematic faces was largely observed in the “Face in the Crowd” (FIC) visual search task. A debate about automaticity and guidance of these effects by emotional/perceptual features is still raging. In order to modify the emotional context, the present study used a state of expectation of punishment (versus safety state). There was an angry superiority effect in the present study. However, we hypothesized and found that the presentation of a cue signalling an imminent threat (punishment) prior to the FIC task impairs the well-known processing advantage for angry schematic faces. On the reverse, the threat cue also facilitates the detection of happy (smiling) schematic faces. These results suggest that selective attention serves at least two basic affective purposes: (1) To efficiently detect threatening signals and (2) to detect potential coping resources in the environment, depending on motivational context. These findings are further discussed in terms of the threat detection system whose role is to respond to potentially dangerous situations [Öhman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108(3), 483–522] and with regards to the counter-regulation principle which suggests that people may be biased towards searching for objects whose valence is opposite to their current affective state [Rothermund, K., Voss, A., & Wentura, D. (2008). Counter-regulation in affective attentional biases: A basic mechanism that warrants flexibility in emotion and motivation. Emotion, 8(1), 34–46].