Fast saccades to faces during the feedforward sweep

Saccadic choice tasks use eye movements as a response method, typically in a task where observers are asked to saccade as quickly as possible to an image of a pre-specified target category. Using this approach, faces-selective saccades have been observed within 100 ms post-stimulus. When taking into account oculomotor processing, this suggests that faces can be detected in as little as 70-80 ms. It has therefore been suggested that face detection must occur during the initial feedforward sweep, since this latency leaves little time for feedback processing. In the current experiment, we tested this hypothesis using backward masking – a technique shown to primarily disrupt feedback processing while leaving feedforward activation relatively intact. Based on minimum saccadic reaction time (SRT), we found that face detection benefitted from ultra-fast, accurate saccades within 110-160 ms and that these eye movements are obtainable even under extreme masking conditions that limit perceptual awareness. However, masking did significantly increase the median SRT for faces. In the manual responses, we found remarkable detection accuracy for faces and houses, even when participants indicated having no visual experience of the test images. These results provide evidence for the view that the saccadic bias to faces is initiated by coarse information used to categorize faces in the feedforward sweep, but that, in most cases, additional processing is required to quickly reach the threshold for saccade initiation.