School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom.
Emotion. 2013 Jun;13(3):537-44. doi: 10.1037/a0031403. Epub 2013 Feb 11.
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.
威胁相关的刺激物，如恐惧的面孔，在人类视觉系统中被优先处理。最近的研究表明，这种优先处理始于无意识处理过程：一个专门的（可能是皮质下的）途径评估视觉输入的威胁相关性，从而使威胁刺激更容易进入意识。我们的数据挑战了这一说法。我们使用连续闪光抑制（CFS）范式在意识之外呈现情绪面孔刺激。已经表明，使用 CFS，显著的（例如，高对比度）和可识别的刺激（面孔、单词）比不那么显著或不那么可识别的刺激更快地变得可见。我们发现，尽管恐惧的面孔比其他面孔更快地从抑制中出现，但这完全是由它们的低水平视觉特性解释的，而不是它们的情绪内容。我们的结论是，在视觉意识的竞争中，视觉系统更喜欢和促进更“像脸”的无意识刺激，但是面孔的情绪内容对刺激的显著性没有影响。
