TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2015//
TI  - Do emotions or gender drive our actions? A study of motor distractibility
JO  - Cognitive neuroscience
A1  - Ambron, Elisabetta
A1  - Rumiati, Raffaella I.
A1  - Foroni, Francesco
SP  - 160
EP  - 169
VL  - 7
IS  - 1-4
N2  - People's interaction with the social environment depends on the ability to attend social cues with human faces being a key vehicle of this information. This study explores whether directing the attention to gender or emotion of a face interferes with ongoing actions. In two experiments, participants reached for one of two possible targets by relying on one of two features of a face, namely, emotion (Experiment 1) or gender (Experiment 2) of a non-target stimulus (a task-relevant distractor). Participants' reaching movements deviated toward the task-relevant distractor in both experiments. However, when attending to the gender of the face the distractor effect was modulated by both gender (task-relevant feature) and emotion (task-irrelevant feature), with the largest movement deviation being observed toward angry male faces. Endogenous allocation of attention toward faces elicits a competing motor response to the ongoing action and the emotional content of the face contributes to this process at a more automatic and implicit level.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1758-8928
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2015.1085373
ID  - ref1
ER  -