Stare in the crowd: frontal face guides overt attention independently of its gaze direction.
Whether or not a stare in the midst of many faces can guide visual attention is a controversial issue. Two experiments are reported that investigate the hypothesis that visual attention is guided toward a frontal face in the search for a stare among faces with varied head angles. The participants were required to search for a face with a direct gaze in a context where the target could be at any of various head angles and the target's head angle was unpredictable in one trial. The search performance was better for a frontal-face target than for deviated-face targets. Furthermore, eye-movement analyses revealed that a frontal-face stimulus tended to be initially fixated prior to deviated-face stimuli, and many of the initially fixated frontal-face stimuli had an averted gaze. The findings suggest that a frontal face guides overt attention independently of its gaze direction in the search for a stare in a crowd. The validity of prioritising a frontal face in order to find a direct gaze among faces and the characteristics of a human-face detection system are discussed.
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation, 3-1 Morinosato Wakamiya, Atsugi-shi, Kanagawa 243, Japan. shirama.aya@lab.ntt.co.jp
Shirama
S
Aya
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D005133:Eye Movements; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results