ECVP 2010 Abstract
doi:10.1068/v100470

Cite as:
Takahashi N, Yamada H, 2010, "The effect of facial distinctiveness on attentional processing" Perception 39 ECVP Abstract Supplement, page 92

The effect of facial distinctiveness on attentional processing

N Takahashi, H Yamada

It has been widely known that unfamiliar faces which are perceived as distinctive or unusual are more accurately recognized in a memory experiment. Such a result might be considered to come partly from the effects of facial distinctiveness on attentional processes. To test this view, Ryu and Chaudhuri (2007 Perception 36 1057-1065) examined the differences in attentional performance between distinctive faces and typical ones in two different attentional tasks that induced attentional blink, and suggested from their results that distinctive faces are associated with greater processing efficiency. The present study investigated the effects of facial distinctiveness on attentional processes in two different attentional tasks: change-detection task and face-identification task. The first change-detection task required participants to detect changes that occurred between two pairs of faces within 500 ms. Changes involving the distinctive face of a pair tend more likely to be detected than those involving a typical face. The second face-identification task required participants to identify either a distinctive or a typical face embedded in each of RSVP sequences. The identification accuracy of distinctive faces were not consistently higher than typical faces. We will discuss our results with respect to the attentional efficiency of faces.

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