Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
5041804 | Consciousness and Cognition | 2016 | 11 Pages |
â¢We measured eye movements towards fear-conditioned faces in the absence of awareness.â¢Elevated skin conductance responses (SCR) indicated effectiveness of conditioning.â¢No specific saccadic bias to unconscious fear-conditioned faces.â¢Saccadic bias to fear-conditioned stimuli may be linked to the SCR magnitude.
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.