Abstract
The present investigation explores the role of bottom-up and top-down factors in the recognition of emotional facial expressions during binocular rivalry. We manipulated spatial frequencies (SF) and emotive features and asked subjects to indicate whether the emotional or the neutral expression was dominant during binocular rivalry. Controlling the bottom-up saliency with a computational model, physically comparable happy and fearful faces were presented dichoptically with neutral faces. The results showed the dominance of emotional faces over neutral ones. In particular, happy faces were reported more frequently as the first dominant percept even in the presence of coarse information (at a low SF level: 2–6 cycle/degree). Following current theories of emotion processing, the results provide further support for the influence of positive compared to negative meaning on binocular rivalry and, for the first time, showed that individuals perceive the affective quality of happiness even in the absence of details in the visual display. Furthermore, our findings represent an advance in knowledge regarding the association between the high- and low-level mechanisms behind binocular rivalry.
Highlights
Emotional facial expressions are the most relevant social cues in everyday human interactions.From an evolutionary perspective, emotions have evolved in order to provide adaptive regulation of our behavior, helping the individual to evaluate the presence of threats or potential mates, and to avoid or approach them depending on whether or not they constitute a relevant concern [1]
We aimed to explore the role of bottom-up and top-down factors in the recognition of emotional facial expressions during binocular rivalry
A neutral face was presented along with an emotional one, 12 for each low-spatial frequencies (SF) band, so that during each low spatial frequencies (LSFs) band dichoptical presentation, we presented at total of 12 neutral faces and 12 emotive faces
Summary
Emotional facial expressions are the most relevant social cues in everyday human interactions. Emotions have evolved in order to provide adaptive regulation of our behavior, helping the individual to evaluate the presence of threats or potential mates, and to avoid or approach them depending on whether or not they constitute a relevant concern [1]. Aside from being detected more rapidly in the visual stream, evidence suggests that emotional facial expressions are more likely to come into awareness and resist failures of attention [2,3]. The interaction between the perigenual prefrontal cortex and amygdala modulates the threshold for awareness of emotional stimuli [7]
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