Nonconscious emotional processing of pictures and videos involve distinct neural pathways
Humans permanently adapt their behavior to facial expressions they encounter in their social environment. Using static stimuli (i.e., pictures), it has been shown that this adaptive phenomenon resists even when the facial expressions are undisriminable and thus processed without awareness. While the ecological superiority of dynamic emotional stimuli (i.e., movies) is now well documented, whether this applies to nonconscious cognition has remained uncovered. To probe the capacity of the visual system to process dynamic stimuli without awareness, we relied on visual crowding, the perceptual phenomenon whereby long-lasting stimuli situated in the periphery of the visual field among similar neighbors are impossible to discriminate. Using a behavioral priming paradigm, we found that participants exposed to crowded faces rated the pleasantness of a subsequent neutral target accordingly to the facial expressions' valence (happy vs. neutral). Using fMRI, we found that while static expressions activated the amygdala and the ventral visual pathway (notably the fusiform face area), dynamic expressions triggered the substantia innominata and the dorsal visual pathway (notably the posterior parietal cortex and supramarginal cortex). Furthermore, both static and dynamic facial expressions activated the hippocampus and the orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting respectively that the nonconscious preference bias may arise from implicit stimulus-response associations, and from modulations of aesthetic preference computations. On the one hand, these results bring new insights regarding the fate of crowded information along the visual pathways. On the other hand, they open the possibility to probe nonconscious form and motion integration, and more generally nonconscious temporal integration.
Keywords:
Awareness,
fMRI
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Consciousness and Awareness
Citation:
Faivre
N and
Kouider
S
(2011). Nonconscious emotional processing of pictures and videos involve distinct neural pathways.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00048
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Received:
15 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
25 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Nathan Faivre, CNRS, Paris, France, nathanfaivre@gmail.com