Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 22, Issue 3, September 2013, Pages 765-770
Consciousness and Cognition

Short Communication
Processing of invisible social cues

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.05.002Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • We used continuous flash suppression to test face processing without awareness.

  • Faces turned towards oneself break through suppression faster than faces turned away.

  • Head direction indicates when another person’s attention is directed at oneself.

  • Head direction is processed without awareness.

Abstract

Successful interactions between people are dependent on rapid recognition of social cues. We investigated whether head direction – a powerful social signal – is processed in the absence of conscious awareness. We used continuous flash interocular suppression to render stimuli invisible and compared the reaction time for face detection when faces were turned towards the viewer and turned slightly away. We found that faces turned towards the viewer break through suppression faster than faces that are turned away, regardless of eye direction. Our results suggest that detection of a face with attention directed at the viewer occurs even in the absence of awareness of that face. While previous work has demonstrated that stimuli that signal threat are processed without awareness, our data suggest that the social relevance of a face, defined more broadly, is evaluated in the absence of awareness.

Keywords

Face perception
Awareness
Interocular suppression
Social cognition

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