The role of spatial frequencies for information selection and attention in the processing of facial expressions
Final Report Abstract
In sum the project revealed a high contextual dependency of attentional capture by emotional faces and thereby qualified the notion that emotional faces capture attention in an unconditionally automatic fashion. With our systematic variation of relevant variables we made a significant contribution to the field of attention and sensitized the scientific community to the high complexity of attention allocation, i.e. the fact that it is neither exclusively top down nor solely bottom up but rather a mixture of both. Specifically, attention to emotional facial expressions relies not only on information from the stimuli of interest but also on the context, which can mean, information from the surrounding environment, but also experiences, stereotypes or time-related information.
Publications
- (2017). Attending to emotional expressions: No evidence for automatic capture in the dot-probe task. Cognition and Emotion
Puls, S., Rothermund, K.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1314932)
