In two experiments, we tested whether fearful facial expressions capture attention in an awareness-independent fashion. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a visible neutral face presented at one of two positions. Prior to the target, a backward-masked and, thus, invisible emotional or neutral face was presented as a cue, either at target position or away from the target position. If negative emotional faces capture attention in a stimulus-driven way, we would have expected a cueing effect: better performance where fearful or (...) disgusted facial cues were presented at target position than away from the target. However, no evidence of capture of attention was found, neither in behavior, nor in event-related lateralizations. In Experiment 2, we went one step further and used fearful faces as visible targets, too. Thereby, we sought to boost awareness-independent capture of attention by fearful faces. However, still, we found no significant attention-capture effect. Our results show that fearful facial expressions do not capture attention in an awareness-independent way. Results are discussed in light of existing theories. (shrink)

How does the language we speak affect our perception? Here, we argue for linguistic relativity and present an explanation through “language-induced automatized stimulus-driven attention” : Our respective mother tongue automatically influences our attention and, hence, perception, and in this sense determines what we see. As LASA is highly practiced throughout life, it is difficult to suppress, and even shows in language-independent non-linguistic tasks. We argue that attention is involved in language-dependent processing and point out that automatic or stimulus-driven forms of (...) attention, albeit initially learned as serving a linguistic skill, account for linguistic relativity as they are automatized and generalize to non-linguistic tasks. In support of this possibility, we review evidence for such automatized stimulus-driven attention in language-independent non-linguistic tasks. We conclude that linguistic relativity is possible and in fact a reality, although it might not be as powerful as assumed by some of its strongest proponents. (shrink)