Non-Threatening Other-Race Faces Capture Visual Attention: Evidence from a Dot-Probe Task

Shahd Al-Janabi, Colin MacLeod and Gillian Rhodes

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 10, 1-7

Abstract: Visual attentional biases towards other-race faces have been attributed to the perceived threat value of such faces. It is possible, however, that they reflect the relative visual novelty of other-race faces. Here we demonstrate an attentional bias to other-race faces in the absence of perceived threat. White participants rated female East Asian faces as no more threatening than female own-race faces. Nevertheless, using a new dot-probe paradigm that can distinguish attentional capture and hold effects, we found that these other-race faces selectively captured visual attention. Importantly, this demonstration challenges previous interpretations of attentional biases to other-race faces as threat responses. Future studies will need to determine whether perceived threat increases attentional biases to other-race faces, beyond the levels seen here.

Date: 2012
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0046119 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 46119&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0046119

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0046119

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().