Straight gaze facilitates face processing but does not cause involuntary attentional capture

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to investigate the conditions under which eyes with a straight gaze capture attention more than eyes with an averted gaze, a phenomenon called the stare-in-the-crowd effect. In Experiment 1, we measured attentional capture by distractor faces with either straight or averted gaze that were shown among faces with closed eyes. Gaze direction of the distractor face was irrelevant because participants searched for a tilted face and indicated its gender. The presence of the distractor face with open eyes resulted in slower reaction times, but gaze direction had no effect, suggesting that straight gaze does not result in more involuntary attentional capture than averted gaze. In three further experiments with the same stimuli, the gaze direction of the target, and not the distractor, was varied. Better performance with straight than averted gaze of the target face was observed when the gaze direction or gender of the target face had to be discriminated. However, no difference between straight and averted was observed when only the presence of a face with open eyes had to be detected. Thus, the stare-in-the crowd effect is only observed when eye gaze is selected as part of the target and only when features of the face have to be discriminated. Our findings suggest that preference for straight gaze bears on target-related processes rather than on attentional capture per se.

KEYWORDS:

• Straight gaze
• visual search
• attention selection
• gaze contact
• attention capture

Acknowledgement

We thank Sascha Zuber for reading the manuscript and providing constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Most of the studies that investigated the stare-in-the-crowd effect used faces with deviated head in order to control for symmetry bias, i.e., a straight gaze with a frontal head appears to be more symmetrical than an averted gaze with a straight head (Conty et al., 2006; Cooper et al., 2013; Senju et al., 2005). However, we argue that the incongruity of the gaze direction and head orientation (Langton, Watt, & Bruce, 2000; Ricciardelli & Driver, 2008) might then enhance the attention capture by straight gaze. We therefore chose to use frontal face views.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Investissements d'avenir [Grant Number ANR-10-IAIHU- 06, ANR-11-INBS-0006]; SWISS NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION [Grant Number P2GEP1_151945]; French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) [Grant Number ANR 12 SAMA 011 04 (“SENSO”)].