TY - JOUR TI - Emotional faces guide the eyes in the absence of awareness AU - Vetter, Petra AU - Badde, Stephanie AU - Phelps, Elizabeth A AU - Carrasco, Marisa A2 - Goodale, Melvyn A2 - Ivry, Richard B A2 - Goodale, Melvyn A2 - de Gelder, Beatrice VL - 8 PY - 2019 DA - 2019/02/08 SP - e43467 C1 - eLife 2019;8:e43467 DO - 10.7554/eLife.43467 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43467 AB - The ability to act quickly to a threat is a key skill for survival. Under awareness, threat-related emotional information, such as an angry or fearful face, has not only perceptual advantages but also guides rapid actions such as eye movements. Emotional information that is suppressed from awareness still confers perceptual and attentional benefits. However, it is unknown whether suppressed emotional information can directly guide actions, or whether emotional information has to enter awareness to do so. We suppressed emotional faces from awareness using continuous flash suppression and tracked eye gaze position. Under successful suppression, as indicated by objective and subjective measures, gaze moved towards fearful faces, but away from angry faces. Our findings reveal that: (1) threat-related emotional stimuli can guide eye movements in the absence of visual awareness; (2) threat-related emotional face information guides distinct oculomotor actions depending on the type of threat conveyed by the emotional expression. KW - eye movements KW - emotion KW - awareness KW - faces KW - continuous flash suppression KW - threat JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -