Effect of spatial frequency content of facial emotional expressions on visual search A Lyczba, A Hunt, A Sahraie |
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Psychology, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom
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| Previous research has suggested threat-related visual information is processed faster than neutral or positive information. For example, saccadic latencies are shorter for orienting to fearful than neutral faces, and this effect is particularly strong for low-pass spatial frequency filtered face images [Bannerman et al., 2012, Emotion, 12(6), 1384-92]. It has also been reported that presentation of fearful faces can boost contrast sensitivity at the presentation location [Phelps et al., 2006, Psychological Science,17(4), 292-299]. In the aforementioned studies emotion was explicit - it served either as a target or a distracter. We attempted to find out if fearful faces could influence visual search performance if emotion was irrelevant to the task. In this study subjects searched for a gender oddball. We varied the spatial frequency content (low spatial frequency versus broadband) and emotional expression (fearful versus neutral). We found that removing high spatial frequency information had a larger effect on visual search time, when the array was composed of fearful faces than when it was composed of neutral ones, even though emotion was irrelevant to the task. The results suggest the fearful faces were more robust against the effect of frequency filtering, leading to faster discrimination of face gender. |
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