Emotional faces guide the eyes in the absence of awareness

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
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Abstract

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.

Data availability

Source data and all analyses are available on Github (https://github.com/StephBadde/EyeMovementsSuppressedEmotionalFaces).

Article and author information

Author details

Petra Vetter

Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, United Kingdom

For correspondence
petra.vetter@rhul.ac.uk

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6516-4637
Stephanie Badde

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4005-5503
Elizabeth A Phelps

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Marisa Carrasco

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States

For correspondence
marisa.carrasco@nyu.edu

Competing interests
Marisa Carrasco, Reviewing editor, eLife.

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (VE 739/1-1)

Petra Vetter

National Institutes of Health (NIH-RO1-EY016200)

Marisa Carrasco

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BA 5600/1-1)

Stephanie Badde

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All participants took part in the experiment in exchange for course credits and signed an informed consent form. The experiment was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the ethics committee of New York University (IRB# 13-9582).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.