A finer-grained search reveals no evidence of the attentional capture by to-be-ignored features.

The contingent capture account of involuntary attention claims that it is guided by top-down factors, such as volitional goals or task instructions. The contrasting rapid disengagement account holds that the contingent capture account relies on the spatial precueing paradigm, which is vulnerable to the elimination of the cue-validity effect through rapid attentional disengagement. In the present study, five experiments were conducted to examine whether a spatial cue presented in a target-defining or distractor-defining color that predicted the location of a subsequently presented target at the chance level involuntarily captures attention by measuring the cue-validity effect. Additionally, to examine the influence of cue-target compatibility as an alternative indicator of attentional capture, an object identical to or different from the target object was presented at the cued location in the cue display in all experiments. The results showed that the cue-validity effect and the cue-target compatibility effect were present only when the target-color cue was presented. The object of the target display presented at the location cued by the target color was recognized even on invalid trials. By contrast, the distractor color cue did not show any indication of attentional capture or postattentive inhibition. These results imply that preattentive selection and postattentive inhibition depend on top-down attentional control setting. Furthermore, the absence of a cue-validity effect with a distractor feature is not due to the inhibition of the cued location after attentional disengagement.

Searching for a face in the crowd: Pitfalls and unexplored possibilities.

Finding a face in a crowd is a real-world analog to visual search, but extending the visual search method to such complex social stimuli is rife with potential pitfalls. We need look no further than the well-cited notion that angry faces "pop out" of crowds to find evidence that stimulus confounds can lead to incorrect inferences. Indeed, long before the recent replication crisis in social psychology, stimulus confounds led to repeated demonstrations of spurious effects that were misattributed to adaptive cognitive design. We will first discuss how researchers refuted these errors with systematic "face in the crowd" experiments. We will then contend that these more careful studies revealed something that may actually be adaptive, but at the level of the signal: Happy facial expressions seem designed to be detected efficiently. We will close by suggesting that participant-level manipulations can be leveraged to reveal strategic shifts in performance in the visual search for complex stimuli such as faces. Because stimulus-level effects are held constant across such manipulations, the technique affords strong inferences about the psychological underpinnings of searching for a face in the crowd.

Angry faces hold attention: Evidence of attentional adhesion in two paradigms.

Growing evidence suggests that angry faces do not "pop-out" of crowds, and that the evidence for such effects has tended to arise from methodological issues and stimulus confounds. In contrast, evidence that angry faces exert special influence at later stages of information processing is accumulating. Here we use two common paradigms to show that participants have difficulty disengaging attention from angry faces relative to happy faces. Experiment 1 used a visual search task to show that angry crowds took longer to search. Experiment 2 used an exogenous cueing paradigm to show that brief onset angry faces held attention and delayed responses on a primary task. This suggests that when seen, they engage attention for longer time, but they do not have the preattentive features that would allow them to pop-out. Together, these two different experimental paradigms and realistic stimulus sets suggest that angry faces resist attentional disengagement.