Attentional capture by spatiotemporally task-irrelevant faces: supportive evidence for Sato and Kawahara (2015).

Visual attention is captured exogenously by stimuli that are congruent with the viewer's current behavioral goals or intentions. However, Sato and Kawahara (Psychol Res 79:523-533, 2015) recently suggested that distractor faces capture attention in an entirely stimulus-driven manner without top-down control of attention, which then attenuates subsequent target identification, using a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. We tested this suggestion, developing a hypothesis that the faces used in the previous study served as task-relevant temporal cues that predicted target timing. To evaluate this hypothesis, we eliminated the task relevance by widely varying distractor-target temporal lags (Experiment 1) and by counterbalancing the distractor-target temporal order (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the deterioration in performance resulting from attentional capture by the peripheral distractor face preceding the target remained robust; this effect was, however, eliminated when the face was inverted (Experiment 3). The present results provide clear evidence that upright faces capture attention exogenously even when they are spatiotemporally task irrelevant.

[The price-based certainty of purchase influences consumer behavior for discount].

Tversky & Kahneman (1981) reported that most participants decided to drive when they could save money on a low-price good as compared to when they could save on a high-price good, even though the discount prices were same. Although this irrational decision making has been interpreted as a rate-dependent estimation of value (prospect theory), this study newly proposes that it can be explained by the certainty of purchase based on the price of goods. Experiment 1 replicated the previously reported difference in decision making, and additionally demonstrated that participants' certainty of purchase was lower for a high- than a low-price good. When it was emphasized that participants' intention to purchase high- and low-price goods were equally sure, decision making did not significantly differ (Experiment 2). Furthermore, decision making differed based only on the certainty of purchase even,when prices of goods were-same (Experiment 3). Consumers' decision making may be rather rational, depending straightforwardly on the certainty of purchase that is susceptible to price.