Decoding dynamic faces and scenes without awareness under dis-continuous flash suppression
Journal
Communications Biology
Journal Volume
8
Journal Issue
1
ISSN
2399-3642
Date Issued
2025-01-31
Author(s)
Abstract
In the perceptual sciences, there is an ongoing debate about the depth of unconscious processing. Here, we address this issue by implementing three improvements with regards to paradigm, stimuli and analyses to explore the neural correlates of unconscious face processing. Our results demonstrated that conscious faces elicited broader univariate activations than conscious scenes. Such results were absent when faces/scenes were suppressed and invisible (n = 43). However, further whole-brain multivariate classification revealed that both static and dynamic invisible faces could be distinguished from scenes in the occipital-temporal region. ROI analysis showed that bilateral FFA and OFA could differentiate dynamic invisible faces from dynamic invisible scenes. These findings suggest that interocularly suppressed faces are still processed in-depth in the ventral visual stream. Therefore, our study highlights the importance of optimizing stimulus signal, experimental paradigm, and analysis to extract unconscious signals in the brain.
Subjects
Adult
Awareness
Brain
Brain Mapping
Face
Facial Recognition
Female
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Pattern Recognition
Visual
Photic Stimulation
Visual Perception
Young Adult
adult
awareness
brain
brain mapping
face
facial recognition
female
human
male
nuclear magnetic resonance imaging
photostimulation
physiology
procedures
vision
visual pattern recognition
young adult
SDGs
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Type
journal article