title: Face proprioception does not modulate access to visual awareness of emotional faces in a continuous flash suppression paradigm.
abstract: An important question in neuroscience is which multisensory information, presented outside of awareness, can influence the nature and speed of conscious access to our percepts. Recently, proprioceptive feedback of the hand was reported to lead to faster awareness of congruent hand images in a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm. Moreover, a vast literature suggests that spontaneous facial mimicry can improve emotion recognition, even without awareness of the stimulus face. However, integration of visual and proprioceptive information about the face to date has not been tested with CFS. The modulation of visual awareness of emotional faces by facial proprioception was investigated across three separate experiments. Face proprioception was induced with voluntary facial expressions or with spontaneous facial mimicry. Frequentist statistical analyses were complemented with Bayesian statistics. No evidence of multisensory integration was found, suggesting that proprioception does not modulate access to visual awareness of emotional faces in a CFS paradigm.
authors.affiliation: Neuroscience and Society Lab, SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy; Faculty of Psychology, Department of Applied Psychology: Health, Development, Enhancement and Intervention, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 5, 1010 Vienna, Austria. Electronic address: Sebastian.korb@univie.ac.at.
authors.forename: Sebastian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Korb
authors.affiliation: Neuroscience and Society Lab, SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy. Electronic address: sofia.osimo@sissa.it.
authors.forename: Sofia A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Osimo
authors.affiliation: Neuroscience and Society Lab, SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy. Electronic address: tsuran@sissa.it.
authors.forename: Tiziano
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Suran
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Science Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. Electronic address: ariel.goldstien@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Ariel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Goldstein
authors.affiliation: Neuroscience and Society Lab, SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy. Electronic address: rumiati@sissa.it.
authors.forename: Raffaella Ida
authors.initials: RI
authors.lastname: Rumiati
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D011434:Proprioception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Embodied cognition; Facial expression; Facial mimicry; Multisensory integration; Visual awareness