The control of attention to faces Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK Markus Bindemann Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK A. Mike Burton Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK Stephen R. H. Langton Department of Psychology, University of Jena, Jena, Germany Stefan R. Schweinberger Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK Martin J. Doherty Humans attend to faces. This study examines the extent to which attention biases to faces are under top-down control. In a visual cueing paradigm, observers responded faster to a target probe appearing in the location of a face cue than of a competing object cue (Experiments 1a and 2a). This effect could be reversed when faces were negatively predictive of the likely target location, making it beneficial to attend to the object cues (Experiments 1b and 2b). It was easier still to strategically shift attention to predictive face cues (Experiment 2c), indicating that the endogenous allocation of attention was augmented here by an additional effect. However, faces merely delayed the voluntary deployment of attention to object cues, but they could not prevent it, even at short cue–target intervals. This finding suggests that attention biases for faces can be rapidly countered by an observer ’s endogenous control. Keywords: attention, faces, endogenous control Citation: Bindemann, M., Burton, A. M., Langton, S. R. H., Schweinberger, S. R., & Doherty, M. J. (2007). The control of attention to faces. Journal of Vision, 7(10):15, 1–8, http://journalofvision.org/7/10/15/, doi:10.1167/7.10.15. Introduction Attention is frequently deployed to faces, to the detriment of other visual stimuli (Bindemann, Burton, Hooge, & Jenkins, 2005; Mack, Pappas, Silverman, & Gay, 2002; Ro, Russell, & Lavie, 2001; Shelley-Tremblay & Mack, 1999; Theeuwes & Van der Stigchel, 2006; Vuilleumier, 2000). This phenomenon, often referred to as attention capture, implies that much of what we see depends on whether a face is present or not in a visual array. However, there are many circumstances when a face is not the intended object of a person’s attention. This study examines the extent to which observers can exert control over an attention bias to faces under these conditions. It is well established that visual attention can be shifted by two orienting mechanisms (e.g., Jonides, 1981). Endogenous attention shifts are under a person’s own control and enable voluntary goal-directed behavior. Exogenous shifts are triggered by external demands, so that attention is reflexively drawn to some stimuli, even when this is counter to a person’s intentions. These involuntary shifts are often referred to as attention capture (e.g., Yantis, 1996) and are usually driven by low-level visual attributes, such as abrupt visual onsets (e.g., Remington, Johnston, & Yantis, 1992) or salient single- tons in a display (e.g., Theeuwes, 1991). Recently, however, similar tests have been applied to more complex stimuli, such as faces, with intriguing results. Schematic faces, for example, appear resistant to metacontrast masking in comparison with their inverted and scrambled counterparts (Shelley-Tremblay & Mack, 1999) and are detected in a visual stream when tree shapes and inverted faces are frequently missed (Mack et al., 2002). Patients with visual neglect also report line-drawn faces more often in the impaired hemifield than scrambled faces and shapes (Vuilleumier, 2000). Thus, it appears that the mere onset of a face stimulus may be sufficient to obtain a person’s attention. A face advantage is also found when a distinction is required between concurrent stimuli. Thus, nonface stimuli are extinguished more often in visual neglect patients when they are presented alongside faces (Vuilleumier, 2000), faces receive more attention than nonface stimuli in change detection tasks (Ro et al., 2001), and faces give rise to inhibition of return alongside a concurrent nonface Journal of Vision (2007) 7(10):15, 1–8 http://journalofvision.org/7/10/15/ 1 doi: 10.1167/7.10.15 Received April 25, 2007; published July 27, 2007 ISSN 1534-7362 * ARVO