Participants searched for discrepant fear-relevant pictures (snakes or spiders) in grid-pattern arrays of fear-irrelevant pictures belonging to the same category (flowers or mushrooms) and vice versa. Fear-relevant pictures were found more quickly than fear-irrelevant ones. Fear-relevant, but not fear-irrelevant, search was unaffected by the location of the target in the display and by the number of distractors, which suggests parallel search for fear-relevant targets and serial search for fear-irrelevant targets. Participants specifically fearful of snakes but not spiders (or vice versa) showed facilitated search for the feared objects but did not differ from controls in search for nonfeared fear-relevant or fear-irrelevant, targets. Thus, evolutionary relevant threatening stimuli were effective in capturing attention, and this effect was further facilitated if the stimulus was emotionally provocative.

/pdf/emotion-drives-attention-detecting-the-snake-in-the-grass-1x2rbs5uld.pdf

Emotion drives attention: detecting the snake in the grass.

As you drive into the centre of town, cars and trucks approach from several directions, and pedestrians swarm into the intersection. The wind blows a newspaper into the gutter and a pigeon does something unexpected on your windshield. This would be a demanding and stressful situation, but you would probably make it to the other side of town without mishap. Why is this situation taxing, and how do you cope?

What attributes guide the deployment of visual attention and how do they do it

A cognitive-motivational analysis of anxiety.

https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1-s2.0-S1364661312000526-main.pdf

The Social Motivation Theory of Autism

Biases in information processing undoubtedly play an important role in the maintenance of emotion and emotional disorders In an attentional cueing paradigm, threat words and angry faces had no advantage over positive or neutral words (or faces) in attracting attention to their own location, even for people who were highly state-anxious In contrast, the presence of threatening cues (words and faces) had a strong impact on the disengagement of attention When a threat cue was presented and a target subsequently presented in another location, high state-anxious individuals took longer to detect the target relative to when either a positive or a neutral cue was presented It is concluded that threat-related stimuli affect attentional dwell time and the disengage component of attention, leaving the question of whether threat stimuli affect the shift component of attention open to debate

/pdf/do-threatening-stimuli-draw-or-hold-visual-attention-in-37m69huiw1.pdf

Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety

It is widely reported that a picture of an angry face seems to figuratively pop out of an array of happy faces, although all of these reports are based on a single experiment by Hansen and Hansen. Pop out, when it occurs, indicates that an observer has located the target by means of a preattentive, parallel search. Hansen and Hansen concluded that it was the affect displayed by the face which caused it to pop out from its surrounding distracters. However, Hansen and Hansen's angry faces contained extraneous dark areas which were introduced when they transformed Ekman and Friesen's photographs of angry and happy faces into black-on-white sketches. When the original artifact-free gray-scaled versions of angry and happy faces were used no evidence for pop out was found. All target faces were found during a serial, self-terminating search regardless of their expression. The angry face in Hansen and Hansen's experiments may have popped out from a crowd of happy faces because of a contrast artifact inadvertently introduced when they created their stimuli.

It Takes a Confounded Face to Pop Out of a Crowd

We have found that a picture of a face is more easily detected than is a pattern of arbitrarily rearranged facial features. An upright face is also more detectable than an inverted face. Using two-alternative forced-choice visual masking paradigms, we have found that this face-detection effect (FDE) can be produced with line drawings and with photocopies of a picture of a face. Our results suggest that a face, as an organized, meaningful pattern, is a more potent stimulus than an arbitrary assemblage of the same visual features. It may be that the FDE is a visual configuration effect. Previous visual configuration effects have been documented only with recognition responses. The FDE, by contrast, documents a configuration effect that affects the detectability of a stimulus.

/pdf/the-face-detection-effect-configuration-enhances-detection-43h24ixvd7.pdf

The face-detection effect: configuration enhances detection.

Theories of visual backward masking all assume that a masked target is eliminated from the visual system. Experiments on reaction time to masked signals suggest otherwise, as does a recent demonstration that a masked target can be restored to phenomenal awareness by backward masking of the target's mask. Two experiments are reported here that substantiate the possibility of recovering a masked target, by using different stimulus materials and a more elaborate design than was employed in the first demonstration of this effect.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/157/3794/1335.full.pdf

Recovery of masked visual targets by inhibition of the masking stimulus.

The ability of a human observer to detect the presence of a briefly flashed picture of a face can depend on the picture's spatial configuration, that is on whether its features are rearranged (jumbled) or are in their normal configuration. The face-detection effect (FDE) is found under conditions of backward masking, when the presence of a face can be detected with shorter masking intervals when it is in the normal than when in the rearranged configuration. A similar effect is found when the subject is asked to classify the face as rearranged or not - the face-classification effect (FCE). Part of the interest of the FDE and the FCE is that they show how the configuration of a stimulus can be an important factor in the perceptual processing which leads to detection and classification of the stimulus. To analyse these effects we recorded from single neurons in the cortex in the superior temporal sulcus of macaques when they were shown (in a visual fixation task) normal and rearranged faces under backward masking conditions shown in experiments 2 and 3 to produce, with the same apparatus, the FCE, and also to produce comparable effects on the identification of which face was present (called hereafter the face-identification effect), and also of the clarity of the face. We found in experiment 1 that there are some face-selective neurons which respond to faces only, or better, when the features in the faces are in their normal configuration rather than rearranged. We also showed in this experiment that the difference in the response to the normal as compared to the rearranged faces became greater when the masking stimulus was delayed more. Thus, at intermediate delays, there are more neurons active for the normal than for the rearranged face. We therefore propose that the FDE, the FCE, and the face-identification effect arise because the total number of neurons activated by faces in their normal configuration is greater than that activated by rearranged faces, because of the sensitivity of some face-selective neurons to the spatial arrangement of the features. The experiments also show that backward visual masking does produce abrupt termination of the firing of neurons in the temporal cortical visual system, so that the duration of a neuronal response is very short when visual stimuli can just be perceived.

The responses of neurons in the temporal cortex of primates, and face identification and detection

In a recent study, McCauley, Parmelee, Sperber, and Carr (1980) reported results indicating that semantic priming had been produced by visual stimuli that were backward masked at durations too brief for greater than chance report. The conclusions drawn from such an experiment are critically dependent upon whether or not the primes were actually masked below the thresh-old for identification during priming trials. The three experiments reported here provide evidence that this requirement was not met. Rather, McCauley et al.’s (1980) methodology allowed for an uncontrolled increase in light adaptation during the actual testing of prime efficacy in the priming session. This increase in light adaptation reduced the effectiveness of the backward mask and resulted in an increase in prime visibility during priming trials. Thus, semantic priming probably occurred under conditions in which commensurate visual information was actually available.

/pdf/another-look-at-semantic-priming-without-awareness-1h5nnti1g9.pdf

Dean G. Purcell

Papers

It Takes a Confounded Face to Pop Out of a Crowd

The face-detection effect: configuration enhances detection.

Recovery of masked visual targets by inhibition of the masking stimulus.

The responses of neurons in the temporal cortex of primates, and face identification and detection

Another look at semantic priming without awareness