The face-in-the-crowd effect: when angry faces are just cross(es)

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Faces are widely considered special in visual recognition, with dedicated cortical processing.
• The 'face-in-the-crowd' effect suggests threatening facial expressions are detected faster, implying evolutionary pathways for processing specific expressions.
• Criticism exists that this effect may stem from low-level visual artifacts, not biological preparedness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if schematic face stimuli, used to control for low-level visual differences, introduce alternative confounding factors.
• To determine if the 'face-in-the-crowd' effect for threatening facial expressions is robust or attributable to low-level features.

Main Methods:

• Replicated the 'face-in-the-crowd' threat advantage using schematic faces.
• Measured a comparable effect using stimuli of obliquely oriented lines, including rotated versions lacking facial resemblance.

Main Results:

• The 'face-in-the-crowd' threat advantage was replicated with schematic faces.
• A similar effect was observed with non-face stimuli (oblique lines), even when rotated.
• These findings suggest low-level visual features, not facial-specific processing, likely explain the effect.

Conclusions:

• The 'face-in-the-crowd' effect observed with schematic faces is likely driven by low-level visual features.
• Evidence for a unique search advantage for specific facial expressions, based on schematic stimuli, is undermined.
• Rethinking the special status of facial processing in visual search tasks is warranted.