Fearful face scrambles increase early visual sensory processing in the absence of face information.

Emotional facial expressions elicit distinct increased early electrophysiological responses. Many studies report even emotional modulations of very early sensory processing at about 80 and 100 ms after stimulus presentation, indexed by the P1. These early effects are often interpreted to index differential responses to biologically relevant expressions. Since specific spatial frequencies differ between fearful and neutral expressions, it has recently been suggested that these early modulations are substantially driven by such low-level visual differences. However, it remains unclear whether similar P1 effects are also observed in experiments in which no recognizable face information is presented at all. This study investigated this question and explored also whether any effects depend on colour information and attentional conditions. Participants (N = 20) performed a continuous perceptual task of low or high difficultly and were presented with task-irrelevant black/white and colour images of fearful and neutral faces, rendered unrecognizable by doing Fourier phase transformation. ERP findings revealed increased P1 amplitudes for fearful scrambles regardless of experimental conditions. Taken together, our findings show early emotional effects in the absence of any facial expression. Specific low-level frequency information seems to increase P1 amplitudes which thus might have implications for the interpretation of very early sensory emotional expression effects.