How Holistic Face Processing Influences Attentional Capture by Working Memory Representations

It is still unclear whether the automatic processing advantage of angry faces can be modulated by top-down cognitive processing. This study aims to explore the guiding mechanism of working memory representations on visual attention to emotional faces. Both experiments adopted a 2*2 within-subjects design. One of the independent variables is the search target, which is divided into two levels: angry target faces and happy target faces; the other independent variable is the relationship between the memory item and the distractor item, which is divided into two levels: matching condition and non-matching condition.Experiment 1 found that an attentional rejection effect occurred when the search target was a happy face. Experiment 2 disrupted the holistic processing of faces by inverting the faces during the visual search stage and found that irrelevant working memory representations captured visual attention in a top-down manner, indicating that irrelevant stimuli matching the working memory representations could capture attention even when faces were inverted. These results suggest that the holistic emotional processing of faces influences the capture of visual attention by irrelevant working memory representations, providing new evidence in support of attentional capture based on working memory representations.