title: Face, body, and center of gravity mediate person detection in natural scenes.
abstract: Person detection is an important prerequisite of social interaction, but is not well understood. Following suggestions that people in the visual field can capture a viewer's attention, this study examines the role of the face and the body for person detection in natural scenes. We observed that viewers tend first to look at the center of a scene, and only then to fixate on a person. When a person's face was rendered invisible in scenes, bodies were detected as quickly as faces without bodies, indicating that both are equally useful for person detection. Detection was optimized when face and body could be seen, but observers preferentially fixated faces, reinforcing the notion of a prominent role for the face in social perception. These findings have implications for claims of attention capture by faces in that they demonstrate a mediating influence of body cues and general scanning principles in natural scenes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, UK. markus@essex.ac.uk
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bindemann
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Scheepers
authors.forename: Heather J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Ferguson
authors.forename: A Mike
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Burton
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D012691:Serial Learning; D012931:Social Environment