How a face may affect object-based attention: evidence from adults and 8-month-old infants

Object-based attention operates on perceptual objects, opening the possibility that the costs and benefits humans have to pay to move attention between-objects might be affected by the nature of the stimuli. The current study reported two experiments with adults and 8-month-old infants investigating whether object-based-attention is affected by the type of stimulus (faces vs. non-faces stimuli). Using the well-known cueing task developed by Egly et al. (1994) to study the object-based component of attention, in Experiment 1 adult participants were presented with two upright, inverted or scrambled faces and an eye-tracker measured their saccadic latencies to find a target that could appear on the same object that was just cued or on the other object that was uncued. Data showed that an object-based effect (a smaller cost to shift attention within-compared to between objects) occurred only with scrambled face, but not with upright or inverted faces. In Experiment 2 the same task was performed with 8-month-old infants, using upright and inverted faces. Data revealed that an object-based effect emerges only for inverted faces but not for upright faces. Overall, these findings suggest that object-based attention is modulated by the type of stimulus and by the experience acquired by the viewer with different objects.