Abstract
Life demands that we adapt our behaviour continuously in situations in which much of our incoming information is emotional and unrelated to our immediate behavioural goals. Such information is often processed without our consciousness. This poses an intriguing question of whether subconscious exposure to irrelevant emotional information (e.g. the surrounding social atmosphere) affects the way we learn. Here, we addressed this issue by examining whether the learning of cue-reward associations changes when an emotional facial expression is shown subconsciously or consciously prior to the presentation of a reward-predicting cue. We found that both subconscious (0.027 s and 0.033 s) and conscious (0.047 s) emotional signals increased the rate of learning, and this increase was smallest at the border of conscious duration (0.040 s). These data suggest not only that the subconscious and conscious processing of emotional signals enhances value-updating in cue–reward association learning, but also that the computational processes underlying the subconscious enhancement is at least partially dissociable from its conscious counterpart.
Highlights
Life demands that we adapt our behaviour continuously in situations in which much of our incoming information is emotional and unrelated to our immediate behavioural goals
Many studies report that emotional information not necessary for achieving an immediate task goal can affect aspects of human behaviour including decision making[1], clarity of memory[2], and learning rates during cuereward association learning[3], and that this is true even when the people are aware that the information is irrelevant to achieving the task goal
Before the main learning task, we conducted a discrimination task (n 5 91) to estimate duration thresholds for conscious discrimination of facial expressions that were based on objective and subjective measures (Figure 1a)
Summary
Life demands that we adapt our behaviour continuously in situations in which much of our incoming information is emotional and unrelated to our immediate behavioural goals. This poses an intriguing question of whether subconscious exposure to irrelevant emotional information (e.g. the surrounding social atmosphere) affects the way we learn We addressed this issue by examining whether the learning of cue-reward associations changes when an emotional facial expression is shown subconsciously or consciously prior to the presentation of a reward-predicting cue. In a cue-reward association-learning study, presentation of a taskindependent fearful face just before the reward-predicting cue accelerated the learning rates compared with presentation of a neutral face; an enhancement effect that was not found in a designed short-term memory task[3] All of these experiments employed an emotional signal that subjects could consciously perceive, and did not account for incoming information that is processed subconsciously (e.g. the surrounding social atmosphere such as feelings of tension in a classroom). We have previously found that learning was enhanced when the duration of face presentation was long (1.0 s)[3] and focus here on how learning is affected by a duration (0.027–0.047 s) that yields less recognisable faces
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
