title: Is fear perception special? Evidence at the level of decision-making and subjective confidence.
abstract: Fearful faces are believed to be prioritized in visual perception. However, it is unclear whether the processing of low-level facial features alone can facilitate such prioritization or whether higher-level mechanisms also contribute. We examined potential biases for fearful face perception at the levels of perceptual decision-making and perceptual confidence. We controlled for lower-level visual processing capacity by titrating luminance contrasts of backward masks, and the emotional intensity of fearful, angry and happy faces. Under these conditions, participants showed liberal biases in perceiving a fearful face, in both detection and discrimination tasks. This effect was stronger among individuals with reduced density in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region linked to perceptual decision-making. Moreover, participants reported higher confidence when they accurately perceived a fearful face, suggesting that fearful faces may have privileged access to consciousness. Together, the results suggest that mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex contribute to making fearful face perception special.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Columbia University 406 Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Ave MC 5501, New York, NY 10027, USA bellkoizumi@gmail.com.|US-Japan Brain Research Cooperation Program, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Japan.|Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Tokyo, Japan.|Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 1-4 Yamadaoka, Suita City, Osaka 565-0871, Japan.
authors.forename: Ai
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Koizumi
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Columbia University 406 Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Ave MC 5501, New York, NY 10027, USA.|California Institute of Technology, Humanities and Social Sciences, Baxter Hall 1200 E. California Blvd.Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
authors.forename: Dean
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mobbs
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology & Brian Research Institute, UCLA 1285 Franz Hall, Bo 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA.
authors.forename: Hakwan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lau
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D000067489:Metacognition / Q000502:physiology; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLFPC); fearful face perception; metacognition; perceptual decision-making; voxel-based morphometry (VBM)