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Cited by 347

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 34 of the 34 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Attention capture by faces

Open access
Langton, Stephen R.H., Law, Anna S., Burton, A. Mike, Schweinberger, Stefan R.·2008·Cognition
DOI 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.012
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Abstract

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array. This irrelevant face effect was eliminated when the items in the arrays were inverted in Experiment 1b ruling out an explanation based on some low-level image-based properties of the faces. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the results of Experiment 1a. Irrelevant faces once again interfered with search for butterflies but, when the roles of faces and butterflies were reversed, irrelevant butterflies no longer interfered with search for faces. This suggests that the irrelevant face effect is unlikely to have been caused by the relative novelty of the faces or arises because butterflies and faces were the only animate items in the arrays. We conclude that these experiments offer evidence of a stimulus-driven capture of attention by faces.

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Metadata

Authors
Langton, S. R. H., Law, A. S., Burton, A. M., & Schweinberger, S. R.
Venue
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2008-04
Volume
107
Issue
1
Pages
330-342
ISSN
0010-0277 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.012
OpenAlex
W2034261125
Cited by
347
References
34
FWCI
5.10
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Attention capture by faces. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.012
The paper
Langton, S. R. H., Law, A. S., Burton, A. M., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2008). Attention capture by faces. Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.012

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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