Abstract
While a large amount of research conducted so far has reported that faces attract attention preferentially, our recent investigations cast doubt onto this general conclusion. In a series of four studies, using a dot-probe task, we systematically controlled face stimuli for visual characteristics, external environments, and task properties. Overall, we typically found a dissociation between manual and oculomotor measures, with no reliable attentional bias towards faces in manual response time data and a numerically small but statistically reliable oculomotor bias towards the eyes of upright faces. Restoring visual facial characteristics (luminance, configuration) and external environmental information (context, frequency) did not bring back the typical pattern of effects; however, increasing perceived attractiveness of the face reinstated some overall manual effects, but not to the magnitude or the strength of typical findings. Together, the results from our studies suggest that social attentional biasing towards faces may be driven by a combination of visual, environmental, and task properties and that it varies as a function of the mode of attentional engagement.