title: Interference between conscious and unconscious facial expression information.
abstract: There is ample evidence to show that many types of visual information, including emotional information, could be processed in the absence of visual awareness. For example, it has been shown that masked subliminal facial expressions can induce priming and adaptation effects. However, stimulus made invisible in different ways could be processed to different extent and have differential effects. In this study, we adopted a flanker type behavioral method to investigate whether a flanker rendered invisible through Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) could induce a congruency effect on the discrimination of a visible target. Specifically, during the experiment, participants judged the expression (either happy or fearful) of a visible face in the presence of a nearby invisible face (with happy or fearful expression). Results show that participants were slower and less accurate in discriminating the expression of the visible face when the expression of the invisible flanker face was incongruent. Thus, facial expression information rendered invisible with CFS and presented a different spatial location could enhance or interfere with consciously processed facial expression information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, The First Affiliated Hospital of AnHui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui Province, China.
authors.forename: Xing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America; State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Sheng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, The First Affiliated Hospital of AnHui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui Province, China.
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, The First Affiliated Hospital of AnHui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui Province, China.
authors.forename: Yong Qiang
authors.initials: YQ
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, The First Affiliated Hospital of AnHui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui Province, China.
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology