Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, CIMeC, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.
Cognition. 2012 Oct;125(1):64-79. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.06.005. Epub 2012 Jul 7.
The rapid visual detection of other people in our environment is an important first step in social cognition. Here we provide evidence for selective sensitivity of the human visual system to upright depictions of conspecifics. In a series of seven experiments, we assessed the impact of stimulus inversion on the detection of person silhouettes, headless bodies, faces and other objects from a wide range of animate and inanimate control categories. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS), a variant of binocular rivalry, to render stimuli invisible at the beginning of each trial and measured the time upright and inverted stimuli needed to overcome such interocular suppression. Inversion strongly interfered with access to awareness for human faces, headless human bodies, person silhouettes, and even highly variable body postures, while suppression durations for control objects were not (inanimate objects) or only mildly (animal faces and bodies) affected by inversion. Furthermore, inversion effects were eliminated when the normal body configuration was distorted. The absence of strong inversion effects in a binocular control condition not involving interocular suppression suggests that non-conscious mechanisms mediated the effect of inversion on body and face detection during CFS. These results indicate that perceptual mechanisms that govern access to visual awareness are highly sensitive to the presence of conspecifics.
快速识别我们环境中的其他人是社会认知的重要第一步。在这里，我们提供了人类视觉系统对同类直立描绘物具有选择性敏感性的证据。在一系列七个实验中，我们评估了刺激反转对从各种有生命和无生命的控制类别中检测人物轮廓、无头身体、面部和其他物体的影响。我们使用连续闪光抑制（CFS），一种双眼竞争的变体，在每次试验开始时使刺激不可见，并测量直立和倒置刺激克服这种眼间抑制所需的时间。对于人类面孔、无头人体、人物轮廓，甚至高度可变的身体姿势，反转强烈干扰了对意识的获取，而控制物体的抑制持续时间不受影响（无生命物体）或仅受轻度影响（动物面孔和身体）。此外，当正常身体形态发生扭曲时，反转效应被消除。在不涉及眼间抑制的双眼控制条件下不存在强烈的反转效应表明，在 CFS 期间，非意识机制介导了反转对身体和面部检测的影响。这些结果表明，控制视觉意识获取的感知机制对同类的存在非常敏感。
