Recent studies showed that stimuli are evaluated more favourably when they are perceived to capture others' attention, an effect coined "mimetic desire". The aim of the present research was to examine the combined role of Need for Cognition and target's facial trustworthiness in this effect. Participants saw movie excerpts of trustworthy and…

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array.…