持續閃現抑制下的無意識情緒訊息處理

Abstract

Scientific study of consciousness has gained great attention in recent decades. Knowing the capacity of unconscious processing is an important step to understand the nature of consciousness. The recent development of Continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm is an excellent tool to probe the unconscious processing of various kinds of information with full processing time and attention. However, it is still hotly debated about which level of information along the visual-ventral pathway can be processed under CFS. We approach this issue in the current thesis by conducting three studies with different measurements to test whether emotional content of facial expression can be processed under CFS. Study 1 showed that own-race familiarity but not orientation familiarity can modulate the time of different facial expression for breaking CFS. Study 2 showed that affective voice with coherent valence can facilitate the processing of corresponding facial expression under CFS, which was supported by breaking-CFS time and eye-movements data. Study 3 showed that invisible affective prime under CFS can affect emotional judgment of subsequent target. These convergent results support that facial expression—which is supposedly processed along ventral pathway—can be processed unconsciously. Moreover, above findings enlighten us to propose a new paradigm, the gaze–contingent CFS paradigm, which combines several advantages from different measurements. We expect this paradigm that may provide a powerful method to probe unconscious processing in the future.