Visual search of emotional faces. Eye-movement assessment of component processes.

In a visual search task using photographs of real faces, a target emotional face was presented in an array of six neutral faces. Eye movements were monitored to assess attentional orienting and detection efficiency. Target faces with happy, surprised, and disgusted expressions were: (a) responded to more quickly and accurately, (b) localized and fixated earlier, and (c) detected as different faster and with fewer fixations, in comparison with fearful, angry, and sad target faces. This reveals a happy, surprised, and disgusted-face advantage in visual search, with earlier attentional orienting and more efficient detection. The pattern of findings remained equivalent across upright and inverted presentation conditions, which suggests that the search advantage involves processing of featural rather than configural information. Detection responses occurred generally after having fixated the target, which implies that detection of all facial expressions is post- rather than preattentional.