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Published May 3, 2012 | Published
Journal Article Open

Nonconscious influences from emotional faces: a comparison of visual crowding, masking, and continuous flash suppression

Abstract

In the study of nonconscious processing, different methods have been used in order to render stimuli invisible. While their properties are well described, the level at which they disrupt nonconscious processing remains unclear. Yet, such accurate estimation of the depth of nonconscious processes is crucial for a clear differentiation between conscious and nonconscious cognition. Here, we compared the processing of facial expressions rendered invisible through gaze-contingent crowding (GCC), masking, and continuous flash suppression (CFS), three techniques relying on different properties of the visual system. We found that both pictures and videos of happy faces suppressed from awareness by GCC were processed such as to bias subsequent preference judgments. The same stimuli manipulated with visual masking and CFS did not bias significantly preference judgments, although they were processed such as to elicit perceptual priming. A significant difference in preference bias was found between GCC and CFS, but not between GCC and masking. These results provide new insights regarding the nonconscious impact of emotional features, and highlight the need for rigorous comparisons between the different methods employed to prevent perceptual awareness.

Additional Information

[This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permission.] Received: 13 March 2012; Paper pending published: 26 March 2012; Accepted: 11 April 2012; Published online: 03 May 2012. Copyright: © 2012 Faivre, Berthet and Kouider. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited. *Correspondence: Nathan Faivre, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France. e-mail: nathan.faivre@ens.fr

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