Qiu Zeguo, Becker Stefanie I, Xia Hongfeng, Hamblin-Frohman Zachary, Pegna Alan J
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
iScience. 2023 Jun 15;26(7):107148. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107148. eCollection 2023 Jul 21.
It has been repeatedly claimed that emotional faces readily capture attention, and that they may be processed without awareness. Yet some observations cast doubt on these assertions. Part of the problem may lie in the experimental paradigms employed. Here, we used a free viewing visual search task during electroencephalographic recordings, where participants searched for either fearful or neutral facial expressions among distractor expressions. Fixation-related potentials were computed for fearful and neutral targets and the response compared for stimuli consciously reported or not. We showed that awareness was associated with an electrophysiological negativity starting at around 110 ms, while emotional expressions were distinguished on the N170 and early posterior negativity only when stimuli were consciously reported. These results suggest that during unconstrained visual search, the earliest electrical correlate of awareness may emerge as early as 110 ms, and fixating at an emotional face without reporting it may not produce any unconscious processing.
人们一再声称，情绪化的面孔很容易吸引注意力，并且它们可能在无意识的情况下得到处理。然而，一些观察结果对这些断言提出了质疑。部分问题可能在于所采用的实验范式。在此，我们在脑电图记录过程中使用了自由观看视觉搜索任务，让参与者在干扰表情中搜索恐惧或中性的面部表情。计算了与注视相关的电位，用于恐惧和中性目标，并比较了有意识报告或未报告的刺激的反应。我们发现，意识与大约110毫秒开始的电生理负电位相关，而只有当刺激被有意识报告时，情绪化表情才在N170和早期后部负电位上有所区分。这些结果表明，在无约束的视觉搜索过程中，意识的最早电相关可能早在110毫秒就出现了，注视情绪化面孔而不报告可能不会产生任何无意识处理。
