Perception of emotional facial expressions in aggression and psychopathy.

Background: Altered affective state recognition is assumed to be a root cause of aggressive behavior, a hallmark of psychopathologies such as psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. However, the two most influential models make markedly different predictions regarding the underlying mechanism. According to the integrated emotion system theory (IES), aggression reflects impaired processing of social distress cues such as fearful faces.

Feature binding is slow: Temporal integration explains apparent ultrafast binding.

Visual perception involves binding of distinct features into a unified percept. Although traditional theories link feature binding to time-consuming recurrent processes, Holcombe and Cavanagh (2001) demonstrated ultrafast, early binding of features that belong to the same object. The task required binding of orientation and luminance within an exceptionally short presentation time.

How (not) to demonstrate unconscious priming: Overcoming issues with post-hoc data selection, low power, and frequentist statistics.

One widely used scientific approach to studying consciousness involves contrasting conscious operations with unconscious ones. However, challenges in establishing the absence of conscious awareness have led to debates about the extent and existence of unconscious processes. We collected experimental data on unconscious semantic priming, manipulating prime presentation duration to highlight the critical role of the analysis approach in attributing priming effects to unconscious processing.

The Scientific Study of Consciousness Cannot and Should Not Be Morally Neutral.

A target question for the scientific study of consciousness is how dimensions of consciousness, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure or reflect on one's own experience, vary in different states and animal species. Considering the tight link between consciousness and moral status, answers to these questions have implications for law and ethics. Here we point out that given this link, the scientific community studying consciousness may face implicit pressure to carry out certain research programs or interpret results in ways that justify current norms rather than challenge them.

Intact prioritization of fearful faces during continuous flash suppression in psychopathy.

Affective state recognition and in particular the identification of fear is known to be impaired in psychopathy. It is unclear, however, whether this reflects a deficit in basic perception ('fear blindness') or a deficit in later cognitive processing. To test for a perceptual deficit, 63 male incarcerated offenders, assessed with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), detected fearful, neutral, and happy facial expressions rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression (CFS).

Gaze direction and face orientation modulate perceptual sensitivity to faces under interocular suppression.

Faces convey information essential for social interaction. Their importance has prompted suggestions that some facial features may be processed unconsciously. Although some studies have provided empirical support for this idea, it remains unclear whether these findings were due to perceptual processing or to post-perceptual decisional factors.

Guns Are Not Faster to Enter Awareness After Seeing a Black Face: Absence of Race-Priming in a Gun/Tool Task During Continuous Flash Suppression.

In the Weapon Identification Task (WIT), Black faces prime the identification of guns compared with tools. We measured race-induced changes in visual awareness of guns and tools using continuous flash suppression (CFS). Eighty-four participants, primed with Black or Asian faces, indicated the location of a gun or tool target that was temporarily rendered invisible through CFS, which provides a sensitive measure of effects on early visual processing.

No effect of value learning on awareness and attention for faces: Evidence from continuous flash suppression and the attentional blink.

It is widely believed that the emotional and movtivational value of social signals, such as faces, influences perception and attention. However, effects reported for stimuli with intrinsic affective value, such as emotional facial expressions, can often be explained by differences in low-level stimulus properties. To rule out such low-level effects, here we used a value-learning procedure, in which faces were associated with different probabilities of monetary gain and loss in a choice game.

The Electronic Bee Spy: Eavesdropping on Honeybee Communication Electrostatic Field Recordings.

As a canary in a coalmine warns of dwindling breathable air, the honeybee can indicate the health of an ecosystem. Honeybees are the most important pollinators of fruit-bearing flowers, and share similar ecological niches with many other pollinators; therefore, the health of a honeybee colony can reflect the conditions of a whole ecosystem. The health of a colony may be mirrored in social signals that bees exchange during their sophisticated body movements such as the waggle dance.

The human visual system differentially represents subjectively and objectively invisible stimuli.

The study of unconscious processing requires a measure of conscious awareness. Awareness measures can be either subjective (based on participant's report) or objective (based on perceptual performance). The preferred awareness measure depends on the theoretical position about consciousness and may influence conclusions about the extent of unconscious processing and about the neural correlates of consciousness.

Dissociating conscious and unconscious influences on visual detection effects.

The scope of unconscious processing is highly debated, with recent studies showing that even high-level functions such as perceptual integration and category-based attention occur unconsciously. For example, upright faces that are suppressed from awareness through interocular suppression break into awareness more quickly than inverted faces. Similarly, verbal object cues boost otherwise invisible objects into awareness.

The hard problem makes the easy problems hard - a reply to Doerig et al.

In their paper Doerig et al. argue that we should put the hard problem aside and focus on empirical data to solve the 'easy' problems of consciousness - finding the neural and functional correlates of consciousness. In other words 'shut up and measure'.

Sorry, baby: Infant faces reach awareness more slowly than adult faces.

Past research has found an attentional bias for positive relative to neutral stimuli, with a greater attentional bias for stimuli that are more motivationally relevant. Baby faces are an example of a motivationally relevant stimulus because they elicit caretaking behaviors. Building on previous work demonstrating that baby faces capture attention, the current study used breaking continuous flash suppression (bCFS) to investigate whether infant faces are prioritized for access to awareness.

Unconscious semantic priming from pictures under backward masking and continuous flash suppression.

It is debated whether the meaning of invisible pictures can be processed unconsciously. We tested whether pictures of animals or objects presented under backward masking or continuous flash suppression could prime the subsequent categorization of target words into animal or non-animal. In Experiment 1, the backward masking part failed to replicate the priming effect reported in two previous studies, despite sufficient statistical power (N = 59).

Examining motion speed processing in schizophrenia using the flash lag illusion.

Research on visual perception in schizophrenia suggests a deficit in motion processing. Specifically, difficulties with discriminating motion speed are commonly reported. However, speed discrimination tasks typically require participants to make judgments about the difference between two stimuli in a two-interval forced choice (2IFC) task.

A new set of metal-organic frameworks synthesised from diisophthalate-based, 2'-phosphorus-substituted m-terphenyl linker molecules.

Four metal-organic frameworks employing the m-terphenyl diisophthalate linker molecule with 2' substitution by P(v)-based functional groups of the central aryl have been synthesised. The dense packing of POMe2/PSMe2 functional groups within UHM-60/UHM-61 (UHM: University of Hamburg Materials) with an underlying net of ucp topology was overcome by increasing the sterical demand of phosphorus substituents. Replacement of the PEMe2 (E = O, S) functional groups by POEt2 or POPh2 gave UHM-62 and UHM-63, respectively, where valid deconstructions of the underlying topology to types 3,3,4,4T199, tim, and tst were found.

Intact prioritisation of unconscious face processing in schizophrenia.

Introduction: Faces provide a rich source of social information, crucial for the successful navigation of daily social interactions. People with schizophrenia suffer a wide range of social-cognitive deficits, including abnormalities in face perception. However, to date, studies of face perception in schizophrenia have primarily employed tasks that require patients to make judgements about the faces.

The danger of interpreting detection differences between image categories: A brief comment on "Mind the snake: Fear detection relies on low spatial frequencies" (Gomes, Soares, Silva, & Silva, 2018).

Using breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS; a perceptual suppression technique), Gomes, Soares, Silva, and Silva (2018) showed that human observers have an advantage in detecting images of snakes (constituting an evolutionarily old threat) over birds. In their study, images of snakes and birds were filtered to contain either coarse-scale or fine-grained information. The preferential detection of snakes relied on coarse-scale (rather than fine-grained) information, which was taken as support for the existence of an evolutionarily old subcortical pathway dedicated to snake detection.

No evidence for abnormal priors in early vision in schizophrenia.

The predictive coding account of psychosis postulates the abnormal formation of prior beliefs in schizophrenia, resulting in psychotic symptoms. One domain in which priors play a crucial role is visual perception. For instance, our perception of brightness, line length, and motion direction are not merely based on a veridical extraction of sensory input but are also determined by expectation (or prior) of the stimulus.

Unconscious processing of facial dominance: The role of low-level factors in access to awareness.

Visual stimuli with social-emotional relevance have been claimed to gain preferential access to awareness. For example, recent studies used the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm (b-CFS) to show that faces that are perceived as less dominant and more trustworthy are prioritized for awareness. Here we asked whether these effects truly reflect differences in social-emotional meaning or whether they can be equally explained by differences in low-level stimulus properties.

Cortical suppression in human primary visual cortex predicts individual differences in illusory tilt perception.

Neural responses to visual stimuli are modulated by spatial and temporal context. For example, in primary visual cortex (V1), responses to an oriented target stimulus will be suppressed when embedded within an oriented surround stimulus. This suppression is orientation-specific, with the largest suppression observed when stimuli in the neuron's classical receptive field and surround are of similar orientation.

Biphasic attentional orienting triggered by invisible social signals.

Biological motion (BM) is one of the most important social cues for detecting conspecifics, prey, and predators. We show that unconscious BM processing can reflexively direct spatial attention, and that this effect has a biphasic temporal profile. Participants responded to probes that were preceded by intact or scrambled BM cues rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression.

No impact of affective person knowledge on visual awareness: Evidence from binocular rivalry and continuous flash suppression.

Stimuli with intrinsic emotional value, like emotional faces, and stimuli associated with reward and punishment are often prioritized in visual awareness relative to neutral stimuli. Recently, Anderson, Siegel, Bliss-Moreau, and Barrett (2011) demonstrated that simply associating a face with affective knowledge can also influence visual awareness. Using a binocular rivalry task (BR), where a face was shown to one eye and a house to the other, they found that faces paired with negative versus neutral and positive behaviors dominated visual awareness.

Between-Subject Variability in the Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression Paradigm: Potential Causes, Consequences, and Solutions.

A recent focus in the field of consciousness research involves investigating the propensity of initially non-conscious visual information to gain access to consciousness. A critical tool for measuring conscious access is the so-called breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm (b-CFS). In this paradigm, a high contrast dynamic pattern is presented to one eye, thereby temporarily suppressing a target stimulus that is presented to the other eye.