RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Distrust Before First Sight: Knowledge- and Appearance-Based Effects of Trustworthiness on the Visual Consciousness of Faces
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.02.24.432562
DO 10.1101/2021.02.24.432562
A1 Anna Eiserbeck
A1 Alexander Enge
A1 Milena Rabovsky
A1 Rasha Abdel Rahman
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/24/2021.02.24.432562.abstract
AB Not all visual stimuli processed by the brain reach the level of conscious perception. Previous research has shown that the emotional value of a stimulus is one of the factors that can affect whether it is consciously perceived. Here, we investigated whether social-affective knowledge influences a face’s chance to reach visual consciousness. Furthermore, we took into account the impact of facial appearance. Faces differing in facial trustworthiness (i.e., being perceived as more or less trustworthy based on appearance) were associated with neutral or negative socially relevant information. Subsequently, an attentional blink task was administered to examine whether the manipulated factors affect the faces’ chance to reach visual consciousness under conditions of reduced attentional resources. Participants showed enhanced detection of faces associated with negative as compared to neutral social information. In event-related potentials (ERPs), this was accompanied by effects in the time range of the early posterior negativity (EPN) component. These findings indicate that social-affective person knowledge is processed already before or during attentional selection and can affect which faces are prioritized for access to visual consciousness. In contrast, no clear evidence for an impact of facial trustworthiness during the attentional blink was found. This study was pre-registered using the Open Science Framework (OSF).Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.