Attentional capture by spatiotemporally task-irrelevant faces: supportive evidence for Sato and Kawahara (2015)

Visual attention is captured exogenously by stimuli that are congruent with the viewer’s current behavioral goals or intentions. However, Sato and Kawahara (Psychol Res 79:523–533, 2015) recently suggested that distractor faces capture attention in an entirely stimulus-driven manner without top-down control of attention, which then attenuates subsequent target identification, using a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. We tested this suggestion, developing a hypothesis that the faces used in the previous study served as task-relevant temporal cues that predicted target timing. To evaluate this hypothesis, we eliminated the task relevance by widely varying distractor-target temporal lags (Experiment 1) and by counterbalancing the distractor-target temporal order (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the deterioration in performance resulting from attentional capture by the peripheral distractor face preceding the target remained robust; this effect was, however, eliminated when the face was inverted (Experiment 3). The present results provide clear evidence that upright faces capture attention exogenously even when they are spatiotemporally task irrelevant.