Fig. 1.

Saccade-based attentional capture tasks. The saccade-based attentional capture task used with human participants is displayed in Panel A. Participants were instructed to fixate on a black central fixation cross and to make a saccade to a peripheral red dot target that would appear on either the left or right side of the screen simultaneously with a centrally presented face distractor for 500 ms. The fixation cross remained on the screen between trials for a jittered period of at least 1000–1500 ms but would remain on the screen indefinitely until participants fixated here for 500 ms before each trial. The central distractors were oval cut-outs of angry, fearful, happy or neutral faces or non-face control distractors (examples are shown). Distractors were either presented with the eyes or the mouth at the central fixation point. All stimuli appeared on a gray background. The task used with monkeys is shown in panel B. Animals faced a computer monitor on stimuli were shown. After holding fixation for 500 ms, a central distractor was simultaneously presented with a peripheral saccade target either to the left or right of center. Monkeys were juice rewarded for making correct saccades and holding fixation on the target for 500 ms. Distractors (examples shown) were either social (portion of a monkey face) or control (scrambled part of a face) images of a specific face part (eyes, nose or mouth) showing a particular facial expression (neutral, submissive, threatening, affiliative).