Probing the influence of unconscious fear-conditioned visual stimuli on eye movements |
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| Affiliation: | 1. College of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China;2. Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Affective and Social Cognitive Science, Shenzhen, 518060, China;3. Center for Language and Brain, Shenzhen Institute of Neuroscience, Shenzhen, 518057, China;4. Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland;1. Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands;2. Department of Neuroimaging and Neuromodeling, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Amsterdam, The Netherlands;3. Department of Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands;4. Department of Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands;5. Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, University Medical Centre Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands |
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| Abstract: | Efficient threat detection from the environment is critical for survival. Accordingly, fear-conditioned stimuli receive prioritized processing and capture overt and covert attention. However, it is unknown whether eye movements are influenced by unconscious fear-conditioned stimuli. We performed a classical fear-conditioning procedure and subsequently recorded participants’ eye movements while they were exposed to fear-conditioned stimuli that were rendered invisible using interocular suppression. Chance-level performance in a forced-choice-task demonstrated unawareness of the stimuli. Differential skin conductance responses and a change in participants’ fearfulness ratings of the stimuli indicated the effectiveness of conditioning. However, eye movements were not biased towards the fear-conditioned stimulus. Preliminary evidence suggests a relation between the strength of conditioning and the saccadic bias to the fear-conditioned stimulus. Our findings provide no strong evidence for a saccadic bias towards unconscious fear-conditioned stimuli but tentative evidence suggests that such an effect may depend on the strength of the conditioned response. |
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| Keywords: | Unconscious processing Saccades Face perception Fear conditioning Skin conductance responses Continuous flash suppression |
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