Tracking Attentional Capture of Emotional Faces: Can it be Top-Down Controlled?

Past research yield mixed results as to whether particular emotional faces capture one’s visual attention involuntarily in a purely stimulus-driven or bottom-up manner, phenomena commonly known as attentional capture. However to date, there are limited studies which infer that attentional capture of emotional faces could be dependent upon the goals/intentions or the top-down attentional controls of the person. The present study uses eye-tracking in addition to previous measures of reaction times in the irrelevant singleton paradigm to gain further insight into whether happy or angry faces capture attention and if top-down processes can control attentional capture of these emotional faces. In particular, three main top-down processes that can affect attention capture of emotional faces are assessed. These are: activation of features that match those of the target in search and inhibition of features that do not match those of the target in search (Experiment 1); and task knowledge of searching for an emotional face (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1 (N = 17) and Experiment 2 (N = 17), participants completed visual search tasks where they searched for a target male or emotional face amongst other neutral non-target faces, while being instructed to ignore any irrelevant emotional or male faces that may appear. Results from Experiment 1 show that in contrast to the notion of top-down inhibition, faces with emotional expressions gain attentional priority over faces with neutral expressions. However this priority is weakened as the number of non-targets are increased suggesting a weak form of attentional capture. Furthermore we see that rather there is evidence of topdown activation processes that may be resulting in attentional capture of the emotional faces. Results from Experiment 2 show that top-down task knowledge strongly affects whether participants are captured by the emotional faces or not