Fearful faces have a sensory advantage in the competition for awareness

Hedger, N. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2733-1913, Adams, W. J. and Garner, M. (2015) Fearful faces have a sensory advantage in the competition for awareness. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance, 41 (6). pp. 1748-1757. ISSN 0096-1523 doi: 10.1037/xhp0000127

Abstract/Summary

Only a subset of visual signals give rise to a conscious percept. Threat signals, such as fearful faces, are particularly salient to human vision. Research suggests that fearful faces are evaluated without awareness and preferentially promoted to conscious perception. This agrees with evolutionary theories that posit a dedicated pathway specialized in processing threat-relevant signals. We propose an alternative explanation for this "fear advantage." Using psychophysical data from continuous flash suppression (CFS) and masking experiments, we demonstrate that awareness of facial expressions is predicted by effective contrast: the relationship between their Fourier spectrum and the contrast sensitivity function. Fearful faces have higher effective contrast than neutral expressions and this, not threat content, predicts their enhanced access to awareness. Importantly, our findings do not support the existence of a specialized mechanism that promotes threatening stimuli to awareness. Rather, our data suggest that evolutionary or learned adaptations have molded the fearful expression to exploit our general-purpose sensory mechanisms.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/88355
Identification Number/DOI	10.1037/xhp0000127
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	No Reading authors. Back catalogue items Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology
Publisher	APA PsycNET
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