Eastwood John D, Smilek Daniel
Department of Psychology, York University, Ont., Canada.
Conscious Cogn. 2005 Sep;14(3):565-84. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2005.01.001.
A substantial body of research has established that even when we are not consciously aware of the faces of others we are nevertheless sensitive to, and impacted by their facial expression. In this paper, we consider this body of research from a new perspective by examining the functions of unconscious perception revealed by these studies. A consideration of the literature from this perspective highlights that existing research methods are limited when it comes to revealing possible functions of unconscious perception. The critical shortcoming is that in all of the methods, the perceived facial expression remains outside of awareness. This is a problem because there are good reasons to believe that one important function of unconsciously perceived negative faces is to attract attention so that they are consciously perceived; such conscious perception, however, is never allowed with existing methodologies. We discuss recent studies of emotional face perception under conditions of visual search that address this issue directly. Further, we suggest that methodologies that do not examine cognitive processes as they occur in more natural settings may result in fundamental misunderstandings of human cognition.
大量研究已经证实，即使我们没有有意识地察觉到他人的面孔，但我们仍然会对他们的面部表情敏感并受到其影响。在本文中，我们通过审视这些研究揭示的无意识感知的功能，从一个新的视角来考虑这一系列研究。从这个角度对文献进行考量后发现，在揭示无意识感知的可能功能方面，现有的研究方法存在局限性。关键的缺点在于，在所有这些方法中，所感知到的面部表情都处于意识之外。这是一个问题，因为有充分的理由相信，无意识感知到的负面面孔的一个重要功能是吸引注意力，以便它们能够被有意识地感知到；然而，现有的方法绝不允许这种有意识的感知出现。我们讨论了在视觉搜索条件下直接解决这个问题的近期情绪面孔感知研究。此外，我们认为，那些没有在更自然的环境中考察认知过程的方法，可能会导致对人类认知的根本性误解。
