Early interactions between orienting, visual sampling and decision making in facial preference

• Published in: Vision research (Oxford) Vol. 46; no. 20; pp. 3331 - 3335
• Main Authors: Simion, Claudiu, Shimojo, Shinsuke
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.10.2006; Elsevier Science
• Subjects: Beauty; Biological and medical sciences; Choice Behavior - physiology; Decision making; Decision Making - physiology; Discrimination (Psychology) - physiology; Eye-movements; Face; Face attractiveness; Face perception; Fixation, Ocular - physiology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Gaze; Gaze-contingent displays; Humans; Orientation - physiology; Orienting behavior; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Perception; Photic Stimulation - methods; Preference; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Vision; Eye-movements; Orienting behavior; Face perception; Gaze; Preference; Decision making; Gaze-contingent displays; Face attractiveness; Interaction; Physical attraction; Eye movement; Vision; Perception; Early; Behavior; Sampling; Face
• ISSN: 0042-6989; 1878-5646
• DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2006.04.019

Decision making has been regarded as the last stage before action in the human information processing, certainly subsequent to sensory sampling and perceptual integration. Our latest study showed that orienting contributes to preference decision making, by integrating preferential looking and mere exposure in a positive feedback loop leading to the conscious choice. Here, we introduce a gaze-contingent window method of stimulus presentation into our experimental paradigm, to completely block holistic stimulus processing while preserving piecemeal sampling through the gaze-contingent “peephole”. This effectively zooms the visual processing in time domain, allowing us to show that orienting and decision making can interact long before the actual conscious choice. The finding also suggests that this interaction is independent of holistic properties of face stimuli and can be totally memory-driven.