Abstract
Free-viewing behavior towards faces in natural scenes is marked by individual differences, including the immediate saccade after image onset. Do such individual differences in face salience include rapid, bottom-up processes? Human faces also elicit rapid saccades in saccadic choice paradigms, which have lower latency than those for other types of objects, are thought to reflect a single feedforward sweep of activation and are hard to suppress. Previous studies investigating these effects focused on group averages. Here, we asked the same set of participants to complete two experiments: A saccadic choice task, which contrasted images of whole, upper and lower faces with car images; and a free-viewing experiment in which participants looked at 700 images of natural scenes. Our findings replicate a latency advantage for face- vs vehicle-directed saccades and show that this advantage is especially pronounced for isolated upper face regions. Crucially, we also find consistent inter-individual differences in the face-directed latency advantage, which show a trend to correlate with the individual tendency to immediately fixate faces in scene viewing. Taken together, our results suggest that the eye-region is sufficient to elicit rapid saccades and that individual differences in face salience include rapid, bottom-up processes.