The influence of extrafoveal emotional faces on prosaccade latencies

Abstract

Across three experiments we sought to determine whether extrafoveally presented emotional faces are processed sufficiently rapidly to influence saccade programming. Two rectangular targets containing a neutral and an emotional face were presented either side of a central fixation cross. Participants made prosaccades towards an abrupt luminosity change to the border of one of the rectangles. The faces appeared 150 ms before or simultaneously with the cue. Saccades were faster towards cued rectangles containing emotional compared to neutral faces even when the rectangles were positioned 12 degrees from the fixation cross. When faces were inverted, the facilitative effect of emotion only emerged in the −150 ms SOA condition, possibly reflecting a shift from configural to featural face processing. Together the results suggest that the human brain is highly specialized for processing emotional information and responds very rapidly to the brief presentation of expressive faces, even when these are located outside foveal vision.

Keywords:

• Attention
• Cognitive control
• Emotion
• Eye movements
• Saccade programming

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Professor Paul Ekman for granting us permission to use the Ekman and Friesen (1976) Pictures of Facial Affect. We acknowledge that the first author was supported by a studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council.