Effects of face and inanimate-object contexts on stimulus-response compatibility

Prior studies have shown that a left-right spatial compatibility effect occurs for vertically oriented stimuli relative to a background context of a face rotated 90° clockwise or counterclockwise from upright. For stimuli presented at the location of the eyes, the mapping of the right eye to a right response and the left eye to a left response, as would be viewed by the participant, yields better performance than does the opposite mapping. An issue of current interest in social cognition is whether animate objects are processed differently from inanimate ones. We investigated this issue in two experiments in which we compared the compatibility effects obtained with inanimate objects to those obtained with animate, face stimuli. The results showed left-right compatibility effects from the participant's perspective for vehicles and faces from frontal and profile views, as well as for a road sign. Our findings indicate that coding of stimulus location relative to an external frame of reference is not restricted to face backgrounds.