Age related differences in affective face visual search among pareidolias under varying levels of stimulus prevalence

Abstract

The goal of the current study was to examine how visual search performance is affected by how often the target appears (in low prevalence and high prevalence conditions) and emotional expression (angry vs happy faces). Visual search is an important cognitive function in which people look around them for a specific target among group of distractors. Earlier studies have shown that when the targets are rare, people are more likely to miss them. This is known as the Low Prevalence Effect (LPE). This study further explored the interactions between age and emotional content and its impact. In the current study participants performed a visual search task in which they were required to identify happy or angry faces among non-face distractors (pareidolia images). The task consisted of both low and high prevalence conditions that is sometimes the target appeared rarely and sometimes very often. The participants had to press “M” key whenever they saw a face and “Z” whenever thet thought that the face is not present. For both target present and absent trials reaction time and accuracy was noted. We also wanted to know when people would give up looking for the face when it was not there. So we also noted the reaction time for target-absent low prevalence trials. This was done to calculate the Quitting Threshold. In target-present high prevalence trials reaction time was used to assess the processing speed. The results showed that participants were less accurate in finding targets during low prevalence conditions supporting the presence of Low Prevalence Effect. Additionally reaction time patterns indicated that when targets are rare participants stopped searching. Emotional expression played a role as well as seen by the differences in the speed and accuracy for identifying angry and happy faces. Also compared to younger participants, older adults tended to search for longer periods of time and had slower reaction times, indicating age related variations in visual search behaviour. 6 Overall the findings suggest that both target frequency and emotional content influence how people search for and detect targets and that these processes may change with age