TITLE:
Visual Attributes of Subliminal Priming Images Impact Conscious Perception of Facial Expressions
AUTHORS:
Melissa A. Huang, Hsin-Mei Sun, Lucia M. Vaina
KEYWORDS:
Facial Expressions, Visual Attributes, Conscious Perception
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science,
Vol.9 No.3,
March
13,
2019
ABSTRACT: We investigated, in young healthy participants, how the affective content of subliminally presented priming images and their specific visual attributes impacted conscious perception of facial expressions. The priming images were broadly categorized as aggressive, pleasant, or neutral and further subcategorized by the presence of a face and by the centricity (egocentric or allocentric vantage-point) of the image content. Participants responded to the emotion portrayed in a pixelated target-face by indicating via key-press if the expression was angry or neutral. Response time to the neutral target face was significantly slower when preceded by face primes, compared to non-face primes (p