Abstract
The extent to which famous distractor faces can be ignored was assessed in six experiments. Subjects categorized famous printed target names as those of pop stars or politicians, while attempting to ignore a flanking famous face distractor that could be congruent (e.g., a politician’s name and face) or incongruent (e.g., a politician’s name with a pop star’s face). Congruency effects on reaction times indicated distractor intrusion. An additional, response-neutral flanker (neither pop star nor politician) could also be present. Congruency effects from the critical distractor face were reduced(diluted) by the presence of an intact anonymous face, but not by phase-shifted versions, inverted faces, or meaningful nonface objects. By contrast, congruency effects from other types of distracting objects (musical instruments, fruits), when printed names for these classes were categorized, were diluted equivalently by intact faces, phase-shifted faces, or meaningful nonface objects. Our results suggest that distractor faces act differently from other types of distractors, suffering from only face-specific capacity limits.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baylis, G. C., &Driver, J. (1992). Visual parsing and response competition: The effect of grouping factors.Perception & Psychophysics,51, 145–162.
Broadbent, D. E. (1958).Perception and communication. London: Pergamon.
Brown, V., Huey, D., &Findlay, J. M. (1997). Face detection in peripheral vision: Do faces pop out?Perception,26, 1555–1570.
Bruce, V., &Young, A. W. (1986). Understanding face recognition.British Journal of Psychology,76, 363–383.
Diamond, R., &Carey, S. (1977). Developmental changes in the representation of faces.Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,23 1–22.
Eriksen, B. A., &Eriksen, C. W. (1974). Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task.Perception & Psychophysics,16, 143–149.
Eriksen, C. W., &Hoffman, J. E. (1972). Temporal and spatial characteristics of selective encoding from visual displays.Perception & Psychophysics,12, 201–204.
Farah, M. J., Levinson, K. L., &Klein, K. L. (1995). Face perception and within-category discrimination in prosopagnosia.Neuropsychologia,33, 661–674.
Farah, M. J., Wilson, K. D., Maxwell Drain, H., &Tanaka, J. R. (1995). The inverted face inversion effect in prosopagnosia: Evidence for mandatory, face-specif ic perceptual mechanisms.Vision Research,35, 2089–2093.
Fodor, J. (1983).The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., &Johnston, J. C. (1992). Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,18, 1030–1044.
Gatti, S. V., &Egeth, H. E. (1978). Failure of spatial selectivity in vision.Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society,11, 181–184.
Gauthier, I., Behrmann, M., &Tarr, M. J. (1999). Can face recognition really be dissociated from object recognition?Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,11, 349–370.
Goren, C. C., Sarty, M., &Wu, P. Y. K. (1975). Visual following and pattern discrimination of face-like stimuli by newborn infants.Pediatrics,56, 544–549.
Hagenaar, R., &van der Heijden, A. H. C. (1986). Target-noise separation in visual selective attention.Acta Psychologica,62, 161–176.
Kahneman, D., &Chajczyk, D. (1983). Tests of the automaticity of reading: Dilution of Stroop effects by color irrelevant stimuli.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,9, 510–522.
Kahneman, D., &Henik, A. (1981). Perceptual organization and attention. In M. Kubovy & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.),Perceptual organization (pp. 181–211). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., &Chun, M. M. (1997). The fusiform face area: A module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception.Journal of Neuroscience,17, 4302–4311.
Koehn, S. M., &Jolicoeur, P. (1994). Impact of quality of the image, orientation, and similarity of the stimuli on visual search for faces.Perception,23, 95–122.
Kramer, A. F., &Jacobson, A. (1991). Perceptual organization and focused attention: The role of objects and proximity in visual processing.Perception & Psychophysics,50, 267–284.
Lavie, N. (1995). Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,21, 451–468.
Lavie, N. (2001). Capacity limits in selective attention: Behavioural evidence and implications for neural activity. In J. Braun, C. Koch, & J. L. Davis (Eds.),Visual attention and cortical circuits (pp. 49–68). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lavie, N., &Cox, S. (1997). On the efficiency of visual selective attention: Efficient visual search leads to inefficient distractor rejection.Psychological Science,8, 395–398.
Lavie, N., &Fox, E. (2000). The role of perceptual load in negative priming.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,26, 1038–1052.
Lavie, N., &Tsal, Y. (1994). Perceptual load as a major determinant of the locus of selection in visual attention.Perception & Psychophysics,56, 183–197.
Maurer, D., &Salapatek, P. (1976). Developmental changes in the scanning of faces by young infants.Child Development,47, 523–527.
McCarthy, G., Puce, A., Gore, J. C., &Allison, T. (1997). Facespecific processing in the human fusiform gyrus.Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,9, 605–610.
McNeil, J. E., &Warrington, E. K. (1993). Prosopagnosia: A facespecific disorder.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,46A, 1–10.
Miller, J. (1987). Priming is not necessary for selective-attention failures: Semantic effects of unattended, unprimed letters.Perception & Psychophysics,41, 419–434.
Morton, J., &Johnson, M. H. (1991). Conspec and conlern: A twoprocess theory of infant face recognition.Psychological Review,98, 164–181.
Nothdurft, H. (1993). Faces and facial expressions do not pop out.Perception,22, 1297–1298.
Perrett, D. I., Hietanan, J. K., Oram, M. W., &Benson, P. J. (1992). Organisation and functions of cells responsive to faces in the temporal cortex.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London,335, 23–30.
Puce, A., Allison, T., Gore, J. C., &McCarthy, G. (1995). Facesensitive regions in human extrastriate cortex studied by functional MRI.Journal of Neurophysiology,74, 1192–1199.
Ro, T., Russell, C., &Lavie, N. (2001). Changing faces: A detection advantage in the flicker paradigm.Psychological Science,12, 94–99.
Smith, M. C., &Magee, L. E. (1980). Tracing the time-course of pictureword processing.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,109, 373–392.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions.Journal of Experimental Psychology,18, 643–662.
Suzuki, S., &Cavanagh, P. (1995). Facial organization blocks access to low-level features: An object inferiority effect.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,21, 901–913.
Tong, F., &Nakayama, K. (1999). Robust representations for faces: Evidence from visual search.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,25, 1016–1035.
Valentine, T. (1988). Upside-down faces: A review of the effect of inversion upon face recognition.British Journal of Psychology,79, 471–491.
Yantis, S., &Johnston, J. C. (1990). On the locus of visual selection: Evidence from focused attention tasks.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,16, 135–149.
Yantis, S., &Jonides, J. (1984). Abrupt visual onsets and selective attention: Evidence from visual search.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,10, 601–621.
Yantis, S., &Jonides, J. (1990). Abrupt visual onsets and selective attention: Voluntary versus automatic allocation.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,16, 121–134.
Yin, R. K. (1969). Looking at upside-down faces.Journal of Experimental Psychology,81, 141–145.
Young, A. W., Ellis, A. W., Flude, B. M., McWeeny, K. H., &Hay, D. C. (1986). Face-name interference.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,12, 466–475.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This work was supported by a Human Frontiers Science Program grant, a BBSRC studentship grant to R.J., and BBSRC Grant 31/S09509. J.D. holds a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jenkins, R., Lavie, N. & Driver, J. Ignoring famous faces: Category-specific dilution of distractor interference. Perception & Psychophysics 65, 298–309 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194801
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194801