Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated the emotion-based modulation in the attentional mechanism by presenting angry and happy faces simultaneously in the extrafoveal vision. In a letter discrimination task at the fixation, pairs of task-irrelevant happy and angry faces were displayed peripherally (≥5° away from the fixation) to study the valence-facilitated attentional capture under mutual competition for processing resources. Selective orienting was assessed using eye movement measures such as the probability of first fixation on these emotional face images. Results revealed a higher probability of first fixation for happy faces than angry ones. Processing of affective stimuli in the extrafoveal indicates early occurring covert orienting of attention followed by overt attention in the foveal vision. The attentional capture advantage by happy faces occurred in the absence of differences in arousal levels. We propose that happy faces have a unique capacity to capture attention when competing with angry faces.