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Visual Search Of Mooney Faces, Jessica E. Goold, Ming Meng

Dartmouth Scholarship

Faces spontaneously capture attention. However, which special attributes of a face underlie this effect is unclear. To address this question, we investigate how gist information, specific visual properties and differing amounts of experience with faces affect the time required to detect a face. Three visual search experiments were conducted investigating the rapidness of human observers to detect Mooney face images. Mooney images are two-toned, ambiguous images. They were used in order to have stimuli that maintain gist information but limit low-level image properties. Results from the experiments show: (1) Although upright Mooney faces were searched inefficiently, they were detected more …