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Description: Recent empirical findings demonstrate that, in visual search for a target in an array of distractors, observers exploit information about object relations to increase search efficiency. We investigated how people searched for interacting people in a crowd, and how the eccentricity of the target affected the search (Experiments 1-3). Participants briefly viewed crowded arrays and had to search for an interacting dyad (two bodies face-to-face) among non-interacting dyads (back-to-back distractors) or vice versa, with the target presented in the attended central location or at peripheral locations. With central targets, we found a search asymmetry, whereby interacting people among non-interacting people were detected better than non-interacting people among interacting people. With peripheral targets, non-interacting targets were detected better than interacting targets. In Experiment 4, we asked whether these asymmetries generalized to object pairs whose spatial relations did or did not form functionally interacting sets (computer screen above keyboard). Results showed that non-interacting targets were detected better than interacting targets, whether presented in central or peripheral locations. Thus, the effect of relational information on visual search is contingent on both stimulus category and attentional focus. Across both stimulus categories (bodies and objects), search is facilitated when individual distractor-items can be organized in larger structured units (social interaction or functional set), effectively reducing the number of distractors. The presentation of social interaction at the attended (central) location breaks this search pattern by readily capturing an individual’s attention.