The Time-Course for the Capture and Hold of Visuospatial Attention by Fearful and Happy Faces

Fearful faces both capture our attention and hold it. However, little is known about the time-course for the capture and hold of spatial attention by fearful, and other emotional, faces. In three dot-probe studies we examined this time-course. Experiments 1 and 2 used fearful and neutral faces. In Experiment 1, dot-probe targets occurred 133, 266, and 532 ms post-face onset and in Experiment 2, dot-probe targets occurred 84, 168, 336, and 672 ms post-face onset. In Experiment 1, for both 133 and 266 ms conditions, reaction times were fastest for congruent trials and slowest for incongruent trials with reaction times for baseline trials falling between the two. The same pattern was found for the 84 and 168 ms conditions in Experiment 2. For the later time-points in both experiments there were no significant differences between conditions. To examine whether this time-course is unique to fearful faces, a third dot-probe experiment using time-points identical to Experiment 2 was conducted with happy and neutral faces. The results from Experiment 3 suggest that happy faces captured and held attention in the 168 and 336 ms conditions. Together, the results indicate that attention is captured and held by fearful faces at times earlier than approximately 300 ms, while happy faces also captured and held attention, but on a slightly different time-course from 168 to 336 ms.