ArticlePsychological research2020
The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes.
Article in Psychological research, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beauty in the eye of the beholder: Attention to attractive faces dissociates across covert and overt measures.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Attentional capture by real and illusory faces: a failure to replicate.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Comparison of face attention bias in adults with ASD, ADHD, or comorbid ADHD+ASD.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Beyond the Whole: Reduced Empathy for Masked Emotional Faces Is Not Driven by Disrupted Configural Face Processing.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The who and the where: Attention to identities and locations in groups.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Maternal attachment security modulates the relationship between vulnerability to anxiety and attentional bias to threat in healthy children.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Associations Between Family Functioning and Social Avoidance and Distress in Patients with Strabismus: A Chain Mediation Model.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- Faces do not guide attention in an object-based facilitation manner.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- A dual mobile eye tracking study on natural eye contact during live interactions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Altered social cognition in a community sample of women with disordered eating behaviours: a multi-method approach.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Do eyes and arrows elicit automatic orienting? Three mutually exclusive hypotheses and a test.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2021Article
- Attention capture by trains and faces in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.PloS one · 2021Article
- How does gaze to faces support face-to-face interaction? A review and perspective.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Review
- Task-related gaze control in human crowd navigation.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2020Article
- Reading and Misleading: Changes in Head and Eye Movements Reveal Attentional Orienting in a Social Context.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- Contextually-Based Social Attention Diverges across Covert and Overt Measures.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is commonly accepted that attention is spontaneously biased towards faces and eyes. However, the role of stimulus features and task settings in this finding has not yet been systematically investigated. Here, we tested if faces and facial features bias attention spontaneously when stimulus factors, task properties, response conditions, and eye movements are controlled. In three experiments, participants viewed face, house, and control scrambled face-house images in an upright and inverted orientation. The task was to discriminate a target that appeared with equal probability at the previous location of the face, house, or the control image. In all experiments, our data indicated no spontaneous biasing of attention for targets occurring at the previous location of the face. Experiment 3, which measured oculomotor biasing, suggested a reliable but infrequent saccadic bias towards the eye region of upright faces. Importantly, these results did not reflect our specific laboratory settings, as in Experiment 4, we present a full replication of a classic finding in the literature demonstrating reliable social attention bias. Together, these data suggest that attentional biasing for social information is task and context mediated, and less robust than originally thought.
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Registered trials
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