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Faces and awareness: low-level, not emotional factors determine perceptual dominance

Faces and awareness: low-level, not emotional factors determine perceptual dominance
Faces and awareness: low-level, not emotional factors determine perceptual dominance
Threat-relevant stimuli such as fear faces are prioritized by the human visual system. Recent research suggests that this prioritization begins during unconscious processing: a specialized (possibly subcortical) pathway evaluates the threat relevance of visual input, resulting in preferential access to awareness for threat stimuli. Our data challenge this claim. We used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to present emotional face stimuli outside of awareness. It has been shown using CFS that salient (e.g., high contrast) and recognizable stimuli (faces, words) become visible more quickly than less salient or less recognizable stimuli. We found that although fearful faces emerge from suppression faster than other faces, this was wholly explained by their low-level visual properties, rather than their emotional content. We conclude that, in the competition for visual awareness, the visual system prefers and promotes unconscious stimuli that are more “face-like,” but the emotional content of a face has no effect on stimulus salience
1528-3542
537-544
Gray, Katie L.H.
b86092bd-a484-4e3f-a367-4c709e90ed77
Adams, Wendy J.
25685aaa-fc54-4d25-8d65-f35f4c5ab688
Hedger, Nicholas
227a4302-301b-41d1-ac07-aeef8f7b4016
Newton, Kristiana E.
0d8b1434-2432-4673-9410-79bd32c91fd0
Garner, Matthew
3221c5b3-b951-4fec-b456-ec449e4ce072
Gray, Katie L.H.
b86092bd-a484-4e3f-a367-4c709e90ed77
Adams, Wendy J.
25685aaa-fc54-4d25-8d65-f35f4c5ab688
Hedger, Nicholas
227a4302-301b-41d1-ac07-aeef8f7b4016
Newton, Kristiana E.
0d8b1434-2432-4673-9410-79bd32c91fd0
Garner, Matthew
3221c5b3-b951-4fec-b456-ec449e4ce072

Gray, Katie L.H., Adams, Wendy J., Hedger, Nicholas, Newton, Kristiana E. and Garner, Matthew (2013) Faces and awareness: low-level, not emotional factors determine perceptual dominance. Emotion, 13 (3), 537-544. (doi:10.1037/a0031403). (PMID:23398580)

Record type: Article

Abstract

Threat-relevant stimuli such as fear faces are prioritized by the human visual system. Recent research suggests that this prioritization begins during unconscious processing: a specialized (possibly subcortical) pathway evaluates the threat relevance of visual input, resulting in preferential access to awareness for threat stimuli. Our data challenge this claim. We used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to present emotional face stimuli outside of awareness. It has been shown using CFS that salient (e.g., high contrast) and recognizable stimuli (faces, words) become visible more quickly than less salient or less recognizable stimuli. We found that although fearful faces emerge from suppression faster than other faces, this was wholly explained by their low-level visual properties, rather than their emotional content. We conclude that, in the competition for visual awareness, the visual system prefers and promotes unconscious stimuli that are more “face-like,” but the emotional content of a face has no effect on stimulus salience

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e-pub ahead of print date: 11 February 2013
Published date: June 2013
Organisations: Psychology

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 347559
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/347559
ISSN: 1528-3542
PURE UUID: 90195ecc-0d8a-449f-aca3-c52866a7991e
ORCID for Wendy J. Adams: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-5832-1056
ORCID for Matthew Garner: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-9481-2226

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Date deposited: 24 Jan 2013 14:00
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:19

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Contributors

Author: Katie L.H. Gray
Author: Wendy J. Adams ORCID iD
Author: Nicholas Hedger
Author: Kristiana E. Newton
Author: Matthew Garner ORCID iD

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