Faces call for attention: evidence from patients with visual extinction

Three patients with left spatial neglect and visual extinction from right brain damage were studied to determine whether faces are privileged in summoning attention. In a first experiment, either a face, a name, or a meaningless shape were briefly presented in the right, left or both visual hemifields. On bilateral trials, all patients extinguished a left-side face much less often than a left-side name or a left-side shape. Conversely, they extinguished a left-side shape more often when it was accompanied by a right-side face rather than a right-side name. In a second experiment, either a face or a scrambled face could appear in the right, left or both hemifields. Again, on bilateral trials, a left-side face was less likely to be missed than a scrambled one. These results suggest an advantage of faces in capturing attention and overcoming extinction, which may be related to their special biological and social value, or to the very efficient and automatic operation of specific perceptual processses that extract facial organization in extrastriate visual areas. These findings also demonstrate that the distribution of spatial attention and extinction can be modulated by the relevance of visual stimuli. This implies that substantial analysis and categorization may take place in the visual system before information from the contralesional field is selected for, or excluded from, attentive vision. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.