Effects Of Perception Load And Task-Relevance On Attention Capture By Self-Face

Since the late fifties, Self-reference stimuli have been described as particularly prone to grab attention by comparison with other stimuli. This claim emerged from the famous study by Moray (1959) using the method of shadowing during a dichotic listening task. Other studies found that the distractive power of human face seemed to be very strong. Self-faces, which have both properties of the face and self-relevance stimuli, provided some good materials to study selective attention. However, the researches on the attention property of self-faces were contradictory. Bredart proposed that self-face could capture attention regardless of its task-load. But Devue’s result showed that only self-face stimuli within central attention could interfere with a number task, while it failed to exert significant influence when appearing outside of attention. We suggested that the factors of perception load and task-relevance played some important role in this confliction.The present research focused on the relationship between self-face stimuli and attention. A visual search paradigm was taken in experiment1to study the attention capture of self-face stimuli in low perception load situation. And the perception load was increased in experiment2to explore the influence of work load. The expeiment3was carried out with unrelated task to study the influence of task-relevance.The results showed that:(1) self-face stimuli showed stronger attention-grabbing capability than stranger-face stimuli in low perception load situation, which proved the advantage of self-face stimuli in attention capture.(2) There was no difference of attention-grabbing capability between self-face and friend-face stimuli, which attributed the self-face advantage to a familiar effect.(3) self-face advantage disappeared in high perception load and task-irrelevant situations, which proved the influence of perception load and task-relevance on self-face attention capture.