Lateral presentation alters overall viewing strategy

Eye tracking has been used during face categorisation and identification tasks to identify perceptually salient facial features and infer underlying cognitive processes. However, viewing patterns are influenced by a variety of gaze biases, drawing fixations to the centre of a screen and horizontally to the left side of face images (left-gaze bias). In order to investigate potential interactions between gaze biases uniquely associated with facial expression processing, and those associated with screen location, face stimuli were presented in three possible screen positions to the left, right and centre. Comparisons of fixations between screen locations highlight a significant impact of the screen centre bias, pulling fixations towards the centre of the screen and modifying gaze biases generally observed during facial categorisation tasks. A left horizontal bias for fixations was found to be independent of screen position but interacting with screen centre bias, drawing fixations to the left hemi-face rather than just to the left of the screen. Implications for eye tracking studies utilising centrally presented faces are discussed

Mixed signals: The effect of conflicting reward- and goal-driven biases on selective attention

© 2017, The Author(s). Attentional selection depends on the interaction between exogenous (stimulus-driven), endogenous (goal-driven), and selection history (experience-driven) factors. While endogenous and exogenous biases have been widely investigated, less is known about their interplay with value-driven attention. The present study investigated the interaction between reward-history and goal-driven biases on perceptual sensitivity (d’) and response time (RT) in a modified cueing paradigm presenting two coloured cues, followed by sinusoidal gratings. Participants responded to the orientation of one of these gratings. In Experiment 1, one cue signalled reward availability but was otherwise task irrelevant. In Experiment 2, the same cue signalled reward, and indicated the target’s most likely location at the opposite side of the display. This design introduced a conflict between reward-driven biases attracting attention and goal-driven biases directing it away. Attentional effects were examined comparing trials in which cue and target appeared at the same versus opposite locations. Two interstimulus interval (ISI) levels were used to probe the time course of attentional effects. Experiment 1 showed performance benefits at the location of the reward-signalling cue and costs at the opposite for both ISIs, indicating value-driven capture. Experiment 2 showed performance benefits only for the long ISI when the target was at the opposite to the reward-associated cue. At the short ISI, only performance costs were observed. These results reveal the time course of these biases, indicating that reward-driven effects influence attention early but can be overcome later by goal-driven control. This suggests that reward-driven biases are integrated as attentional priorities, just as exogenous and endogenous factors.This research was supported by an ERC advanced grant [ERC-2012-AdG–323413 Jan Theeuwes

The Role of Emotional Expression and Eccentricity on Gaze Perception

The perception of another’s gaze direction and facial expression complements verbal communication and modulates how we interact with other people. However, our perception of these two cues is not always accurate, even when we are looking directly at the person. In addition, in many cases social communication occurs within groups of people where we can’t always look directly at every person in the group. Here, we sought to examine how the presence of other people influences our perception of a target face. We asked participants to judge the direction of gaze of the target face as either looking to their left, to their right or directly at them, when the face was viewed on its own or viewed within a group of other identity faces. The target face either had an angry or a neutral expression and was viewed directly (foveal experiment), or within peripheral vision (peripheral experiment). When the target was viewed within a group, the flanking faces also had either neutral or angry expressions and their gaze was in one of five different directions (from averted leftwards to averted rightwards in steps of 10°). When the target face was viewed foveally there was no effect of target emotion on participants’ judgments of its gaze direction. There was also no effect of the presence of flankers (regardless of expression) on the perception of the target gaze. When the target face was viewed peripherally, participants judged its direction of gaze to be direct over a wider range of gaze deviations than when viewed foveally, and more so for angry faces than neutral faces. We also find that flankers (regardless of emotional expression) did not influence performance. This suggests that observers judge that angry faces were looking at them over a broad range of gaze deviations in the periphery only, possibly resulting from increased uncertainty about the stimulus

Context homogeneity facilitates both distractor inhibition and target enhancement

Homogeneous contexts were shown to result in prioritized processing of embedded targets compared to heterogeneous context

Action Planning Mediates Guidance of Visual Attention from Working Memory

Visual search is impaired when a salient task-irrelevant stimulus is presented together with the target. Recent research has shown that this attentional capture effect is enhanced when the salient stimulus matches working memory (WM) content, arguing in favor of attention guidance from WM. Visual attention was also shown to be closely coupled with action planning. Preparing a movement renders action-relevant perceptual dimensions more salient and thus increases search efficiency for stimuli sharing that dimension. The present study aimed at revealing common underlying mechanisms for selective attention, WM, and action planning. Participants both prepared a specific movement (grasping or pointing) and memorized a color hue. Before the movement was executed towards an object of the memorized color, a visual search task (additional singleton) was performed. Results showed that distraction from target was more pronounced when the additional singleton had a memorized color. This WM-guided attention deployment was more pronounced when participants prepared a grasping movement. We argue that preparing a grasping movement mediates attention guidance from WM content by enhancing representations of memory content that matches the distractor shape (i.e., circles), thus encouraging attentional capture by circle distractors of the memorized color. We conclude that templates for visual search, action planning, and WM compete for resources and thus cause interferences