Visual awareness and the detection of fearful faces

A commonly held view is that emotional stimuli are processed independently of awareness. Here, the authors parametrically varied the duration of a fearful face target stimulus that was backward masked by a neutral face. The authors evaluated awareness by characterizing behavioral performance using receiver operating characteristic curves from signal detection theory. Their main finding was that no universal objective awareness threshold exists for fear perception. Although several subjects displayed a behavioral pattern consistent with previous reports (i.e., targets masked at 33 ms), a considerable percentage of their subjects (64%) were capable of reliably detecting 33-ms targets. Their findings suggest that considerable information is available even in briefly presented stimuli (possibly as short as 17 ms) to support masked fear detection. Emotional stimuli, such as a picture of a fearful face or an aversive scene, are processed rapidly. For example, when viewing such pictures, subjects exhibit fast, involuntary, autonomic re-sponses (Ohman, Esteves, & Soares, 1995). Under some condi-tions, the processing of emotional stimuli may proceed when the stimuli are outside the focus of attention (Vuilleumier, Armony