title: Attention to faces: effects of face inversion.
abstract: Attention may be biased towards faces but a face advantage may be linked to the upright orientation of a face. Three experiments, employing a flanker and a cuing paradigm, investigated effects of face orientation, perceptual load and allocation of attention. Experiment 1 demonstrated that, irrespective of load, attention is biased towards upright face distractors while inverted face distractors are easy to ignore. Experiment 2 verified that inverted face distractors can interfere provided that they are attended to volitionally, likely because the volitional allocation of attention promotes face processing and gender classification (Experiment 3).
authors.affiliation: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. b.olk@jacobs-university.de
authors.forename: Bettina
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Olk
authors.forename: Andrea M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Garay-Vado
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult