Abstract
Faces contain rich information and play a pivotal role in human daily social interactions. Previous studies have provided evidence for the left-visual-field-advantage in face perception. The current study investigated lateralisation when face stimuli were unconsciously presented using interocular suppression methods. The results showed that when an unconscious face stimulus was presented in one side of the visual field without other face stimuli, the unconscious face in the right visual field could break through interocular suppression faster than that in the left (Experiments 1 and 2). However, this right visual field processing advantage reversed to the left when a face stimulus either with (Experiment 2) or without (Experiment 3) visual awareness was presented concurrently with or prior to (Experiment 4) the unconscious face stimuli. These results showed that the unconscious face might have a different processing pattern compared with the conscious face. The relationship between this novel behavioural observation and known functional lateralisation of the fusiform face areas is discussed, suggesting a dynamic interaction between the two cortical hemispheres may underlie the formation of visual awareness for faces. The current study expands our understanding of face processing lateralisation and provided evidence on the asymmetric inter-hemisphere interaction patterns in forming visual awareness.
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Funding
This research was supported by grants from the STI2030-Major Projects (2021ZD0204200), the Sino-German Center for Research Promotion (M-0705 to Ming Meng), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 31871136 to Ming Meng), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant 2020M672661 to Shuai Chang), and the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (2023A1515012596 to Shuai Chang).
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Shuai Chang, Ling He and Ming Meng conceived and designed the experiments. Shuai Chang, Ling He, Rong Jiang and Xinyu Zhang performed the experiments and analysed the data. Shuai Chang and Ming Meng wrote the manuscript. All the authors approved the final manuscript for publication.
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Chang, S., He, L., Jiang, R. et al. Unconscious face processing shows a different lateralisation pattern. Psychon Bull Rev 31, 649–658 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02367-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02367-2