Searching for faces differs from categorization: Evidence from scenes and eye movements

This study examined whether the detection of frontal, ¾ and profile face views differs from their categorization as faces. Experiment 1 compared three tasks that required observers to determine the presence or absence of a face but varied in the extent to which they had to search for faces in simple displays and small or large scenes to make this decision. Performance was equivalent for all face views in simple displays and small scenes, but was notably slower for profile views when this required the search for faces in extended scene displays. This search effect was confirmed in Experiment 2, which compared observers’ eye movements with their response times to faces in visual scenes. These results demonstrate that the categorization of faces at fixation is dissociable from the detection of faces in space. Consequently, we suggest that face detection should be studied with extended visual displays, such as natural scenes.