Spontaneous attention to people impairs change detection in natural scenes

Faces capture attention, supporting key social processes, yet most research has examined them in isolation. This study investigated whether people (faces and bodies) capture attention in naturalistic contexts using a flicker change-detection paradigm. Participants viewed photographs of real-world scenes, with or without people, and identified changes between alternating images. Across three experiments, change detection was consistently impaired when people were present in the images, indicating that people may be drawing attention away from the surrounding environment. This effect was more prominent when people appeared infrequently (on 25% of trials), but weakened when they appeared frequently (on 75% of trials) and were irrelevant to the task. These findings suggest that people may be drawing attention spontaneously in complex visual scenes. This extends evidence of attentional biases for person stimuli and highlights the importance of task context in attentional processes.