Flanker Effects With Faces May Depend on Perceptual as Well as.pdf

Flanker Effects With Faces May Depend on Perceptual as Well as Emotional Differences Gernot Horstmann, Kirsten Borgstedt, and Manfred Heumann Bielefeld University Do threatening or negative faces capture attention? The authors argue that evidence from visual search, spatial cuing, and flanker tasks is equivocal and that perceptual differences may account for effects attributed to emotional categories. Empirically, the authors examine the flanker task. Although they replicate previous results in which a positive face flanked by negative faces suffers more interference than a negative face flanked by positive faces, further results indicate that face perception is not necessary for the flanker-effect asymmetry and that the asymmetry also occurs with nonemotional stimuli. The authors conclude that the flanker-effect asymmetry with affective faces cannot be unambiguously attributed to emotional differences and may well be due to purely perceptual differences between the stimuli. Keywords: emotion, attention, facial expression Attentional control is often described in terms of dichotomies: exogenous versus endogenous, top down versus bottom up, con- cept driven versus data driven, or intentional versus automatic (e.g., Jonides, 1981; Yantis, 1993). These dichotomies strive to capture the assumption that attention can be controlled by the attending subject but that sometimes a stimulus appears to attract attention in itself. For example, an observer may intentionally move his eyes around in a room with the goal of finding his keys, and he may need to do so because it is the only way to succeed. (He may even have his eyes fixated, and his attention may shift “covertly,” as is often required in psychological experiments, although this behavior would be quite odd under normal circum- stances.) Conversely, salient stimuli, such as a blue towel on green turf, may attract attention although they are not deliberately searched for. Among the features for which an involuntarily at