title: Interactive effects between gaze direction and facial expression on attentional resources deployment: the task instruction and context matter.
abstract: In three experiments, we tested whether the amount of attentional resources needed to process a face displaying neutral/angry/fearful facial expressions with direct or averted gaze depends on task instructions, and face presentation. To this end, we used a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation paradigm in which participants in Experiment 1 were first explicitly asked to discriminate whether the expression of a target face (T1) with direct or averted gaze was angry or neutral, and then to judge the orientation of a landscape (T2). Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 except that participants had to discriminate the gender of the face of T1 and fearful faces were also presented randomly inter-mixed within each block of trials. Experiment 3 differed from Experiment 2 only because angry and fearful faces were never presented within the same block. The findings indicated that the presence of the attentional blink (AB) for face stimuli depends on specific combinations of gaze direction and emotional facial expressions and crucially revealed that the contextual factors (e.g., explicit instruction to process the facial expression and the presence of other emotional faces) can modify and even reverse the AB, suggesting a flexible and more contextualized deployment of attentional resources in face processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy.|Milan Centre for Neuroscience, Italy.
authors.forename: Paola
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ricciardelli
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, Italy.
authors.forename: Luisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lugli
authors.affiliation: Division for Clinical and Cognitive Sciences, Department of Neurology Medical Faculty, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
authors.forename: Antonello
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pellicano
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication and Economics, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Iani
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, Italy.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Nicoletti
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger / Q000502:physiology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D054518:Attentional Blink / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation