Attention to faces: effects of face inversion
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Updated: Jun 1, 2026

Analyzing Neural Activity and Connectivity Using Intracranial EEG Data with SPM Software
Published on: October 30, 2018
Bettina Olk1, Andrea M Garay-Vado
1School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. b.olk@jacobs-university.de
Abstract:
Attention may be biased towards faces but a face advantage may be linked to the upright orientation of a face. Three experiments, employing a flanker and a cuing paradigm, investigated effects of face orientation, perceptual load and allocation of attention. Experiment 1 demonstrated that, irrespective of load, attention is biased towards upright face distractors while inverted face distractors are easy to ignore. Experiment 2 verified that inverted face distractors can interfere provided that they are attended to volitionally, likely because the volitional allocation of attention promotes face processing and gender classification (Experiment 3).
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