How emotions affect what we see
Final Report Abstract
The overall goal of the project was to investigate how emotional information influences visual perception and fundamental visual processing in the human brain. This goal was motivated by findings by Phelps, Ling & Carrasco (2006) who demonstrated that emotional information facilitates visual perception and affects fundamental and early visual processes. More recently, Spering and Carrasco (2011; 2015) discovered that eye movement patterns can reveal visual processing of stimuli even when we are not consciously aware of these stimuli. The control of eye movements is a fundamental mechanisms of visual processing. In this project, we investigated whether emotional information is also able to guide eye movements, even when viewers are not consciously aware of the emotional information. Our goal was to use eye movements as a marker for unconscious processing of emotional visual information, and therefore reveal how fundamental visual processing is affected by emotion. We used face images with different emotional expressions (neutral, angry and fearful) and rendered them unconscious using continuous flash suppression. In continuous flash suppression, a colourful and fast flickering mask is presented to one eye which suppresses a low contrast stimulus, in our case an emotional face, displayed in the other eye. When suppression is successful, all that participants consciously perceive is the flickering mask and they are unaware of the face image in the other eye. We measured eye movements in two experiments while participants tried to detect the position and emotional expression of the face hidden behind the mask. Our results demonstrate that participants move their eyes towards an emotional face even when it is suppressed from consciousness. Angry faces first attract eye movements and then lead to gaze aversion away from the angry face, whereas fearful faces attract eye movements later and longer without gaze aversion. The results confirm our hypothesis and demonstrate for the first time that unconscious emotional information in faces attracts eye movements for preferential visual processing. Our results show that emotional valence is processed unconsciously and that is capable of affecting fundamental visual processing and action such as eye movement behaviour. In sum, our findings exemplify the unconscious power of emotions on visual perception and action.
Publications
- (2015) Spatiotopic maps in calcarine sulcus of the congenitally blind. Journal of Vision, 15(12): 125
Vetter, P., Reich, L. & Amedi, A.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1167/15.12.125) - (2016). Decoding emotional valence of sounds in early visual cortex. Journal of Vision, 16(12): 472
Vetter, P., Petrini, K., Piwek, L. Smith, F.W., Solanki, V., Bennett, M., Pollick, F. & Muckli, L.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1167/16.12.472) - (2017). Why cognitive penetration of our perceptual experience is still the most plausible account. Consciousness & Cognition, 47, 26-37
Newen, A. & Vetter, P.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.09.005)
