No abstract

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array. This irrelevant face effect was eliminated when the items in the arrays were inverted in Experiment 1b ruling out an explanation based on some low-level image-based properties of the faces. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the results of Experiment 1a. Irrelevant faces once again interfered with search for butterflies but, when the roles of faces and butterflies were reversed, irrelevant butterflies no longer interfered with search for faces. This suggests that the irrelevant face effect is unlikely to have been caused by the relative novelty of the faces or arises because butterflies and faces were the only animate items in the arrays. We conclude that these experiments offer evidence of a stimulus-driven capture of attention by faces.3

Face recognition can be facilitated by previous presentation both of the same face and of an associated person's face. In Experiment 1, the effects of face repetition and associative priming on event-related potentials (ERPs) were compared. Repetition decreased reaction times (RTs) and modulated both early (180-290 ms) and late ERPs beyond 310 ms. Associative priming caused a topographically equivalent late ERP modulation, although RTs and early ERPs were unaffected. The results suggest that repetition acted on an early processing locus, presumably the activation of face representations. Both repetition and associative priming affected a relatively late locus, probably the activation of person-related semantic information. In Experiment 2, face repetitions were omitted and associative priming effects were observed both in ERPs and RTs. This indicates that ERPs may reflect automatic aspects of associative priming more directly than do RTs.

Age-related slowing in recognizing famous names and faces was investigated with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In a group of young adults, item repetition induced early (220-340 ms) and late (400-700 ms) ERP modulations, apparently signaling the access to, respectively, domain-specific representations of faces and names and domain-general semantic knowledge about the persons. These repetition effects and other ERP components were then used as process-specific time markers in middle-aged and elderly participants. For both faces and names, the elderly participants' responses were slowed, but repetition priming in reaction times was not. The ERP latencies suggested that most of the age-related slowing occurred in the access to domain-specific representations and during response decision, whereas sensory and perceptual processing was largely spared.

We investigated event-related brain potentials elicited by repetitions of cars, ape faces, and upright and inverted human faces. A face-selective N250r response to repetitions emerged over right temporal regions, consistent with a source in the fusiform gyrus. N250r was largest for human faces, clear for ape faces, non-significant for inverted faces, and completely absent for cars. Our results suggest that face-selective neural activity starting at 200 ms and peaking at 250-300 ms is sensitive to repetition and relates to individual recognition.