Su Junzhu, van Boxtel Jeroen J A, Lu Hongjing
Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States of America.
School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Victoria, 3800, Australia.
PLoS One. 2016 Aug 10;11(8):e0160468. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0160468. eCollection 2016.
Humans are social animals, constantly engaged with other people. The importance of social thought and action is hard to overstate. However, is social information so important that it actually determines which stimuli are promoted to conscious experience and which stimuli are suppressed as invisible? To address this question, we used a binocular rivalry paradigm, in which the two eyes receive different action stimuli. In two experiments we measured the conscious percept of rival actions and found that actions engaged in social interactions are granted preferential access to visual awareness over non-interactive actions. Lastly, an attentional task that presumably engaged the mentalizing system enhanced the priority assigned to social interactions in reaching conscious perception. We also found a positive correlation between human identification of interactive activity and the promotion of socially-relevant information to visual awareness. The present findings suggest that the visual system amplifies socially-relevant sensory information and actively promotes it to consciousness, thereby facilitating inferences about social interactions.
人类是社会性动物，始终与他人相互交往。社会思想和行动的重要性怎么强调都不为过。然而，社会信息是否重要到实际上能决定哪些刺激被提升为有意识的体验，哪些刺激被作为不可见的而被抑制呢？为了解决这个问题，我们使用了双眼竞争范式，其中两只眼睛接收不同的动作刺激。在两个实验中，我们测量了对竞争动作的有意识感知，发现参与社会互动的动作比非互动动作更优先进入视觉意识。最后，一个可能涉及心理化系统的注意力任务增强了在有意识感知中赋予社会互动的优先级。我们还发现，人类对互动活动的识别与将社会相关信息提升到视觉意识之间存在正相关。目前的研究结果表明，视觉系统会放大与社会相关的感官信息，并积极将其提升为意识，从而促进对社会互动的推断。
