Page 89 - Demo

Attractiveness modulates attention874ProcedureThe procedure and apparatus for Experiment 3 were similar to Experiment 1. However, we used a modified Posner cuing task (Deaner et al., 2007; Posner, 1980) to test gaze following. Instead of showing two pictures on the side, one frontfacing picture was presented in the middle of the screen for 300 ms. Hereafter, the same face was again presented in the middle of the screen but now looking either to the left side or the right side of the screen for 300 ms. After this, the location of the probe would either be congruent (same side as looking direction) or incongruent (opposite side of looking direction (Figure 5). Participants performed 60 trials in total.2As in Experiment 1, participants validated all stimuli (both front-facing and sidefacing) after the experiment in a randomized order by rating their attractiveness on a 7-point ordinal scale. Again, we used these scores to determine whether the ratings of the participants aligned well with the predetermined attractiveness categories (attractive, intermediate, unattractive). Subjects rated both the central-looking stimuli and the side-looking stimuli. However, because central and side ratings correlated very strongly (rs = .82, 89% CI [.82, .83], pd = 1.00), we used only the central ratings for further validation.Statistical AnalysesWe first excluded extremely fast and slow reactions times, following the same method as described for Experiment 1. The lower and upper filter resulted in exclusion of 476 of 9,000 trials (5.29%). The highest number of excluded trials per participant was 10.Our statistical methods were similar to those described for Experiment 1, with a few exceptions. To test our hypothesis, we created a model that used by-subject mean-centered RT as the dependent variable and the interaction between attractiveness category (attractive, intermediate, unattractive stimulus) and gaze congruency (probe location congruent/incongruent with gaze direction). Due to convergence problems, it was not possible to add by-subject random slopes for the interaction to the model; therefore, the random-effect structure consisted of only random intercepts per subject and trial number.2 Due to a coding error, an additional sensitive, touchable area was presented in the middle of the screen on the slide showing the probe. Technically, a participant’s RT could be logged if they clicked this additional sensitive area instead of the probe. However, because this sensitive area was transparent and thus invisible to the participants, it is highly unlikely that they tapped within that area instead of tapping the probe. Also, the fact that no participants had an extreme amount of extremely fast or extremely slow responses suggests that they were following the instruction to tap the probe properly.Tom Roth.indd 87 08-01-2024 10:41