Distinct Attention Capture for Self- and Familiar Faces in Visual Search

Faces are salient social stimuli that convey critical information for communication but compete with other inputs for limited attentional resources. Selection among these inputs can be guided by multiple factors, including the perceptual salience of a stimulus, its relevance to task goals, its reward value, or prior learning about it. One’s own face captures attention even when it is neither perceptually salient nor task-relevant. This self-face bias has been proposed to reflect reward value, though others suggest it reflects mere familiarity. Prior studies have compared attention to the self- versus other familiar, but less rewarding, faces, yet findings have been mixed and these inconsistencies may reflect varying task demands (e.g., the goal-relevance of faces across paradigms). The present study used an attention capture paradigm to compare automatic attention orienting to the self-, familiar, and stranger faces that appeared as a task-irrelevant distractor within multi-object search arrays of varying set size. The presence of any face distractor impaired target detection performance, confirming that faces capture attention even when irrelevant to an ongoing task. However, distraction also varied across both face identity and the context of the search array. Faces facilitated target detection at moderate set sizes but interfered at larger set sizes. Moreover, when the target was present, the self-face captured attention most within moderate set sizes, whereas familiar faces did so at the largest set size. These findings demonstrate context-dependent, identity-specific attention capture and suggest that the attention biases to the self- and familiar faces may reflect different mechanisms.