No effect of value learning on awareness and attention for faces: Evidence from continuous flash suppression and the attentional blink.

It is widely believed that the emotional and motivational value of social signals, such as faces, influences perception and attention. However, effects reported for stimuli with intrinsic affective value, such as emotional facial expressions, can often be explained by differences in low-level stimulus properties. To rule out such low-level effects, here we used a value-learning procedure, in which faces were associated with different probabilities of monetary gain and loss in a choice game. In three experiments involving 149 participants we tested the influence of affective valence (win- vs. loss-associated faces) and motivational salience (probability of monetary gain or loss) on visual awareness, attention, and memory. Using continuous flash suppression and rapid serial visual presentation we found no effects of affective valence or motivational salience on visual awareness of faces. Furthermore, in two experiments there was no evidence for a modulation of the attentional blink, indicating that acquired emotional and motivational value does not influence attentional priority of faces. However, we found that motivational salience boosted recognition memory, and this effect was particularly pronounced for win-associated faces. These results indicate that acquired affective valence and motivational salience affect only later processing of faces related to memory, but do not directly affect visual awareness and attention.

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Multisensory constraints on awareness

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2013.0207 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 369 (1641) ◽

pp. 20130207 ◽

Cited By ~ 34

Author(s):

Ophelia Deroy ◽

Yi-Chuan Chen ◽

Charles Spence

Keyword(s):

Information Processing ◽

Attentional Blink ◽

Multisensory Integration ◽

Binocular Rivalry ◽

Visual Information ◽

Perfect Match ◽

Repetition Blindness ◽

Backward Masking ◽

Perceptual Awareness ◽

Continuous Flash Suppression

Given that multiple senses are often stimulated at the same time, perceptual awareness is most likely to take place in multisensory situations. However, theories of awareness are based on studies and models established for a single sense (mostly vision). Here, we consider the methodological and theoretical challenges raised by taking a multisensory perspective on perceptual awareness. First, we consider how well tasks designed to study unisensory awareness perform when used in multisensory settings, stressing that studies using binocular rivalry, bistable figure perception, continuous flash suppression, the attentional blink, repetition blindness and backward masking can demonstrate multisensory influences on unisensory awareness, but fall short of tackling multisensory awareness directly. Studies interested in the latter phenomenon rely on a method of subjective contrast and can, at best, delineate conditions under which individuals report experiencing a multisensory object or two unisensory objects. As there is not a perfect match between these conditions and those in which multisensory integration and binding occur, the link between awareness and binding advocated for visual information processing needs to be revised for multisensory cases. These challenges point at the need to question the very idea of multisensory awareness.

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A Quick Visual Mind Can be a Slow Auditory Mind

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169.56.1.33 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 56 (1) ◽

pp. 33-40 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Sander Martens ◽

Addie Johnson ◽

Martje Bolle ◽

Jelmer Borst

Keyword(s):

Attentional Blink ◽

Task Difficulty ◽

Human Mind ◽

Visual Modality ◽

Present Evidence ◽

Conscious Level ◽

Visual Targets ◽

Concurrent Information

The human mind is severely limited in processing concurrent information at a conscious level of awareness. These temporal restrictions are clearly reflected in the attentional blink (AB), a deficit in reporting the second of two targets when it occurs 200–500 ms after the first. However, we recently reported that some individuals do not show a visual AB, and presented psychophysiological evidence that target processing differs between “blinkers” and “nonblinkers”. Here, we present evidence that visual nonblinkers do show an auditory AB, which suggests that a major source of attentional restriction as reflected in the AB is likely to be modality-specific. In Experiment 3, we show that when the difficulty in identifying visual targets is increased, nonblinkers continue to show little or no visual AB, suggesting that the presence of an AB in the auditory but not in the visual modality is not due to a difference in task difficulty.

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