Repetition blindness for faces reflects identity coding but not emotion coding.
Repetition blindness for visually presented stimuli occurs when only one of two similar items is available to a viewer's conscious awareness. The objective of this experiment was to investigate repetition blindness for faces and to observe whether encoding of similar emotions displayed on different individuals' faces produced repetition blindness. A further aim was to assess whether such an effect could be modulated by attentional task demands (sex judgment or expression judgment). Faces were presented so that four within-participant conditions could be compared: Complete repetition, same emotion/different Identity repetition, same identity/different Emotion repetition, and No repetition trials. The data revealed repetition blindness for Complete and same identity/different Emotion repetitions, but not for same emotion/different Identity repetitions. The lack of an "emotion blindness" effect supports previous reports that emotional expressions do not necessarily lead to automatic attentional biases.
Buttle
Heather
H
School of Psychology, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. h.buttle@massey.ac.nz
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012737:Sex Factors