Visual attention is captured by task-irrelevant faces, but not by pareidolia faces

It has been reported that visual attention is captured exogenously by faces. This study used pareidolia faces and examined whether subjective perception of a face is sufficient for capturing attention or the registry of an actual face is necessary for attentional capture. Three experiments demonstrated that a completely task-irrelevant face distractor captured attention exogenously, in turn disrupting subsequent target identification in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm (Experiment 1). However, the task-irrelevant pareidolia face distractor did not cause attentional capture (Experiment 2), although it was perceived as a face (Experiment 3). Thus, the subjective perception of a task-irrelevant face is insufficient to trigger stimulus-driven attentional capture; the registry of an actual face is necessary for attentional capture. The visual system may have a cognitive mechanism preattentively discriminating actual faces from face-like objects.