Probing “pop-out”: Another look at the face-in-the-crowd effect

Abstract

C. H. Hansen and R. D. Hansen (1988) found that an angry face in a crowd of happy faces can be found faster than a happy face in a crowd of angry faces. They called this finding the face-in- the-crowd effect (FICE). The present experiments replicated this effect for nine-face crowds but not for four-face crowds. Hansen and Hansen concluded that their result was due to “pop out,” because they found no reliable effect of crowd size for angry face targets. Contrary to prediction from the “pop out” hypothesis, we found that the position of the target face within the crowd had an effect on reaction time. Such positional effects demonstrate that subjects were scanning the face array to locate the target face. Examination of the literature on the perception of facial expression suggests that the FICE may be produced, at least in part, by the crowds scanned rather than by the target scanned for. The present paper suggests that conclusive evidence of “pop-out” should consist of both the absence of target-position effects and the conventionally accepted small-stimulus-set-size effects. © 1989, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.