Unconscious processing of facial dominance: The role of low-level factors in access to awareness.

Abstract

Visual stimuli with social-emotional relevance have been claimed to gain preferential access to awareness. For example, recent studies used the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm (b-CFS) to show that faces that are perceived as less dominant and more trustworthy are prioritized in awareness. Here we asked whether these effects truly reflect differences in social-emotional meaning or whether they can be equally explained by differences in low-level stimulus properties. In Experiment 1, we successfully replicated dominance-and untrustworthiness-related slowing for upright faces. However, these effects were equally strong for inverted faces, even though it was more difficult to perceive social characteristics in inverted faces. The previously reported correlation between dominance-and untrustworthiness-related slowing in b-CFS and self-reported propensity to trust did not replicate. Experiment 2 showed that dominance-related slowing in b-CFS can also be observed when only presenting the eye region of faces, and even when the eye region was presented inverted and/or with reversed contrast polarity, in which case personality traits were no longer discernible. These results were replicated in Experiment 3 following a pre-registration protocol. Altogether, our findings link dominance-related slowing in b-CFS to physical differences in the eye region that are-when presented in isolation-unrelated to the perception of dominance. We conclude that low-level physical stimulus differences provide a parsimonious explanation for the effect of social facial characteristics on access to awareness.

The Role of Gender in the Preconscious Processing of Facial Trustworthiness and Dominance

“…However, only a marginally significant difference in suppression times between the least trustworthy faces and neutral faces was found. Moreover, Stein et al (2018) replicated the findings of Stewart et al (2012) but suggested that the effect of facial dominance on suppression times was due to low-level physical stimulus characteristics. In addition, Abir et al (2018) found that more dominant faces and untrustworthy faces took shorter suppression times.…”

“…In addition, people needed only 40 ms to make judgments of dominance from faces (Rule et al, 2012). In recent years, a number of studies have applied the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm (b-CFS; e.g., Jiang et al, 2007) to investigate the preconscious processing of faces, demonstrating that facial trustworthiness and dominance could still be processed preconsciously albeit inconsistently (Stewart et al, 2012; Getov et al, 2015; Abir et al, 2018; Stein et al, 2018). In b-CFS, noise patterns were presented to one of the participants’ eyes while faces were presented to the other eye.…”

“…The above studies (Stewart et al, 2012; Getov et al, 2015; Abir et al, 2018; Stein et al, 2018) all used computer-generated faces to investigate the preconscious processing of facial dominance and trustworthiness. Although they could accurately manipulate the experimental combinations with different levels of dominance and trustworthiness, their computer-generated faces were bald males, and they seemed unnatural, reducing the ecological validity of these studies.…”

Faces under continuous flash suppression capture attention faster than objects, but without a face-evoked steady-state visual potential: Is curvilinearity responsible for the behavioral effect?

“…Our results are consistent with prior reports that would suggest so. Such features have been shown to drive the nonconscious processing of face identity ( Gelbard-Sagiv, Faivre, Mudrik, & Koch, 2016 ), expression ( Hedger et al, 2015 ), and dominance ( Stein, Awad, Gayet, & Peelen, 2018 ; Gayet et al, 2014 ), although it is yet unclear whether these features are themselves being processed nonconsciously ( Pitts, Martínez, & Hillyard, 2012 ), or if the effect is due to partial awareness ( Gelbard-Sagiv et al, 2016 ).…”

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

“…For example, shorter suppression times for fearful faces in CFS reflect higher effective contrast rather than enhanced processing of threat (Hedger, Adams, & Garner, 2015). Similarly, the influence of facial dominance on breaking CFS is related to local contrast in the face's eye regions rather than to social evaluation (Stein, Awad, Gayet, & Peelen, 2018). One elegant way of ruling out the influence of low-level stimulus properties is to use stimuli that differ only with regard to their affective learning history.…”