Repetition Blindness for Faces Reflects Identity Coding but Not Emotion Coding

Abstract

Repetition blindness for visually presented stimuli occurs when only one of two similar items is available to a viewer's conscious awareness. The objective of this experiment was to investigate repetition blindness for faces and to observe whether encoding of similar emotions displayed on different individuals' faces produced repetition blindness. A further aim was to assess whether such an effect could be modulated by attentional task demands (sex judgment or expression judgment). Faces were presented so that four within-participant conditions could be compared: Complete repetition, same emotion/different Identity repetition, same identity/different Emotion repetition, and No repetition trials. The data revealed repetition blindness for Complete and same identity/different Emotion repetitions, but not for same emotion/different Identity repetitions. The lack of an "emotion blindness" effect supports previous reports that emotional expressions do not necessarily lead to automatic attentional biases.

Repetition Blindness for Faces: A Comparison of Face Identity, Expression, and Gender Judgments

“…There was a complete RB effect for all three judgment tasks. This is consistent with previous research for expression (complete repeat; Buttle, 2010 ), gender judgments of faces ( Buttle, 2010 ), and unfamiliar and famous face identification (Coltheart, et al , 2004 ; Mondy, et al , 2004 ). Identity repeats (same face, different emotion) also produced RB in the three judgment tasks.…”

“…An extensive body of research shows that RB occurs for words and objects (e.g., Arnell & Jolicoeur, 1997 ; Bavelier, 1994 ; Coltheart et al, 2005 ; Harris & Dux, 2005 ; Kanwisher, 1987 ; Kanwisher & Yin, 1993 ; Kanwisher, Yin, & Wojciulik, 1999 ). However, very few studies have examined RB for faces ( Buttle, 2010 ; Coltheart, Bornhofen, Mondy, & Stephenson, 2004 ; Mondy, Coltheart, & Stephenson, 2004 ; Mowszowski, McDonald, Wang, & Bornhofen, 2012 ). Coltheart and colleagues ( Coltheart et al, 2004 ; Mondy et al, 2004 ) demonstrated that RB occurred for famous faces, unfamiliar faces, nonfamous faces with differing facial expressions, and for different photographs of the same person.…”

“…Coltheart and colleagues ( Coltheart et al, 2004 ; Mondy et al, 2004 ) demonstrated that RB occurred for famous faces, unfamiliar faces, nonfamous faces with differing facial expressions, and for different photographs of the same person. Buttle ( 2010 ) investigated RB for facial expression and gender judgments using four types of stimulus repetition: complete repeat (same individual and emotion), emotion repeat (different individual, same emotion), identity repeat (same individual, different emotion) and no repeat (different individual, different emotion). Emotion repetition did not produce RB for either the expression or gender judgments.…”

“…In relation to Buttle ( 2010 ), one issue was that the study used the same number of single and dual target trials. This differs from many other RB studies that have used a small number of single target trials (e.g., approximately 5%) to control for response bias (e.g., Coltheart et al, 2005 ; Harris & Dux, 2005 ).…”

A single dose of antidepressant alters eye-gaze patterns across face stimuli in healthy women

“…The processing of face stimuli may be modulated by selective spatial attention or may be conditional on the participant's intentional goals and general understanding of the task (Buttle 2010). Our study asked the volunteers to rate facial attractiveness to maintain attention to the face stimulus.…”