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

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Stein ◽  
Sara Verosky
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Blink ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Attention And Memory ◽  
Affective Valence ◽  
Emotional Facial Expressions ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Motivational Salience ◽  
Value Learning ◽  
Monetary Gain

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.

scholarly journals Not All Emotions Are Equal: Fear Chemosignals Lower Awareness Thresholds Only for Fearful Faces

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (7) ◽  
pp. 601-608
Author(s):  
Fábio Silva ◽  
Nuno Gomes ◽  
Sebastian Korb ◽  
Gün R Semin
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Body Odor ◽  
Emotional Facial Expressions ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Fearful Faces ◽  
Processing Stream ◽  
Body Odors

Abstract Exposure to body odors (chemosignals) collected under different emotional states (i.e., emotional chemosignals) can modulate our visual system, biasing visual perception. Recent research has suggested that exposure to fear body odors, results in a generalized faster access to visual awareness of different emotional facial expressions (i.e., fear, happy, and neutral). In the present study, we aimed at replicating and extending these findings by exploring if these effects are limited to fear odor, by introducing a second negative body odor—that is, disgust. We compared the time that 3 different emotional facial expressions (i.e., fear, disgust, and neutral) took to reach visual awareness, during a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, across 3 body odor conditions (i.e., fear, disgust, and neutral). We found that fear body odors do not trigger an overall faster access to visual awareness, but instead sped-up access to awareness specifically for facial expressions of fear. Disgust odor, on the other hand, had no effects on awareness thresholds of facial expressions. These findings contrast with prior results, suggesting that the potential of fear body odors to induce visual processing adjustments is specific to fear cues. Furthermore, our results support a unique ability of fear body odors in inducing such visual processing changes, compared with other negative emotional chemosignals (i.e., disgust). These conclusions raise interesting questions as to how fear odor might interact with the visual processing stream, whilst simultaneously giving rise to future avenues of research.

No impact of affective person knowledge on visual awareness: Evidence from binocular rivalry and continuous flash suppression.

Emotion ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (8) ◽  
pp. 1199-1207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Stein ◽  
Caitlyn Grubb ◽  
Maria Bertrand ◽  
Seh Min Suh ◽  
Sara C. Verosky
Keyword(s):  
Binocular Rivalry ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression

scholarly journals Neural Correlates of Motion-induced Blindness in the Human Brain

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 1235-1243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marieke L. Schölvinck ◽  
Geraint Rees
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Target Location ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Bistable Perception ◽  
Visual Phenomenon ◽  
High Level ◽  
Visual Cortical

Motion-induced blindness (MIB) is a visual phenomenon in which highly salient visual targets spontaneously disappear from visual awareness (and subsequently reappear) when superimposed on a moving background of distracters. Such fluctuations in awareness of the targets, although they remain physically present, provide an ideal paradigm to study the neural correlates of visual awareness. Existing behavioral data on MIB are consistent both with a role for structures early in visual processing and with involvement of high-level visual processes. To further investigate this issue, we used high field functional MRI to investigate signals in human low-level visual cortex and motion-sensitive area V5/MT while participants reported disappearance and reappearance of an MIB target. Surprisingly, perceptual invisibility of the target was coupled to an increase in activity in low-level visual cortex plus area V5/MT compared with when the target was visible. This increase was largest in retinotopic regions representing the target location. One possibility is that our findings result from an active process of completion of the field of distracters that acts locally in the visual cortex, coupled to a more global process that facilitates invisibility in general visual cortex. Our findings show that the earliest anatomical stages of human visual cortical processing are implicated in MIB, as with other forms of bistable perception.

scholarly journals Can value learning modulate low-level visual object recognition? An ERP study

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 36-36
Author(s):  
J. L. O'Brien ◽  
H. J.V. Rutherford ◽  
J. E. Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Object Recognition ◽  
Visual Object ◽  
Visual Object Recognition ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Value Learning

scholarly journals Continuous Flash Suppression Known and Unknowns

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Pournaghdali ◽  
Bennett L Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Experimental Configuration ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Nonconscious Perception

Studies utilizing continuous flash suppression (CFS) provide valuable information regarding conscious and nonconscious perception. There are, however, crucial unanswered questions regarding the mechanisms of suppression and the level of visual processing in the absence of consciousness with CFS. Research suggests that the answers to these questions depend on the experimental configuration and how we assess consciousness in these studies. The aim of this review is to evaluate the impact of different experimental configurations and the assessment of consciousness on the results of the previous CFS studies. We review studies that evaluated the influence of different experimental configuration on the depth of suppression with CFS and discuss how different assessments of consciousness may impact the results of CFS studies. Finally, we review behavioral and brain recording studies of CFS. In conclusion, previous studies provide evidence for survival of low-level visual information and complete impairment of high-level visual information under the influence of CFS. That is, studies suggest that nonconscious perception of lower-level visual information happens with CFS but there is no evidence for nonconscious highlevel recognition with CFS.

scholarly journals Preprint:The neglected contribution of memory encoding in spatial cueing: A new theory of costs and benefits

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
HUI CHEN ◽  
Brad Wyble
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Blink ◽  
Limited Resource ◽  
Open Science ◽  
Common Mechanism ◽  
Attention And Memory ◽  
Memory Encoding ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Spatial Cueing ◽  
Science Framework

Spatial cueing is one of the most robust effects in cognitive psychology and has been thought for decades to indicate the resource limits of the visual attention system given that invalidly cued items are processed less efficiently than neutral ones. However, limited resource accounts cannot explain findings of dividing attention without yielding noticeable costs as well as findings showing benefits without costs in spatial cueing. The current study presents a new account of cueing effects, namely the memory encoding cost (MEC) theory, which integrates attention and memory encoding effects in an explanation of the costs and benefits evoked by a spatial cue. Unlike previous theories that focused only on the role of attention in yielding spatial cueing effects, the MEC theory argues that cueing effects are driven by two distinct mechanisms: attentional facilitation and a memory encoding cost. That is, the cost of an invalid cue as measured by target report is entirely or at least partially driven by memory encoding of the cue which extends across the entire visual field, while the benefit of a valid cue is the net effect of a combination of this encoding cost, and a spatiotopic attentional facilitation. The crucial implication of this theory is that attention may be unlimited despite the observation of invalidity costs. MEC generates a number of predictions that we test here, providing three convergent lines of evidence for such encoding costs in cueing paradigms. Furthermore, as the MEC suggests a common mechanism underlying cueing costs and the attentional blink, we simulated the core empirical findings of the current study by using an existing attentional blink model and found that the model was able to simulate them with manipulation of a single parameter that corresponds to memory encoding. The MEC theory thus simplifies our theoretical understanding of attentional effects by linking the attentional blink and spatial cueing costs to a common mechanism. The code and data for all of the reported experiments and simulations are available on the Open Science Framework at this URL:https://osf.io/ckqrj/?view_only=0d1e9b6f412d47109e933201b61de78c

scholarly journals Low-level properties of dynamic Mondrians, not their predictability, empower continuous flash suppression

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 960
Author(s):  
Shui'Er Han ◽  
David Alais ◽  
Randolph Blake
Keyword(s):  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Low Level
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