Do facially disfiguring features influence attention and perception of faces? Evidence from an antisaccade task.

ABSTRACT: Facial disfigurements can influence how observers attend to and interact with the person, leading to disease-avoidance behaviour and emotions (disgust, threat, fear for contagion). However, it is unclear whether this behaviour is reflected in the effect of the facial stigma on attention and perceptual encoding of facial information. We addressed this question by measuring, in a mixed antisaccade task, observers' speed and accuracy of orienting of visual attention towards or away from peripherally presented upright and inverted unfamiliar faces that had either a realistic looking disease-signalling feature (a skin discolouration), a non-disease-signalling control feature, or no added feature. The presence of a disfiguring or control feature did not influence the orienting of attention (in t

SUBMITTER: Boutsen L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8958561 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature