Citation

Papeo L, Goupil N, Soto-Faraco S. Psychol. Sci. 2019; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797619867295

PMID

31532709

Abstract

Humans can effectively search visual scenes by spatial location, visual feature, or whole object. Here, we showed that visual search can also benefit from fast appraisal of relations between individuals in human groups. Healthy adults searched for a facing (seemingly interacting) body dyad among nonfacing dyads or a nonfacing dyad among facing dyads. We varied the task parameters to emphasize processing of targets or distractors. Facing-dyad targets were more likely to recruit attention than nonfacing-dyad targets (Experiments 1, 2, and 4). Facing-dyad distractors were checked and rejected more efficiently than nonfacing-dyad distractors (Experiment 3). Moreover, search for an individual body was more difficult when it was embedded in a facing dyad than in a nonfacing dyad (Experiment 5). We propose that fast grouping of interacting bodies in one attentional unit is the mechanism that accounts for efficient processing of dyads within human groups and for the inefficient access to individual parts within a dyad.

Language: en

Keywords

face perception; social cognition; social perception; visual attention; visual search