Summary: A new study shows that people attend to their own face automatically and can do so even when the face is presented outside conscious awareness.
Source: APS.
Our attention has limited capacity, so most sensory input never reaches awareness. But what happens to stimuli that the brain detects without conscious recognition? New research in Psychological Science finds that our own face is a powerful stimulus that captures attention automatically, even when we are not aware we have seen it.
“Previous work has shown that the brain can process simple stimuli subliminally. We wanted to know whether more complex stimuli — such as faces — can be processed outside of awareness and influence behavior,” explains lead author Micha Wójcik, who carried out the study at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw and is now a PhD student at the University of Oxford.
Faces are complex visual objects: although many faces share similar features, observers typically recognize familiar faces quickly by integrating multiple elements such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. The research team proposed that one’s own face, as a highly self-relevant and familiar stimulus, might be recognized and prioritized by the brain even without conscious identification.
“Our own face is a particularly salient element of self-related information,” says coauthor Anna Nowicka, who researches how people process information about themselves. “It evokes emotions and associations and strongly attracts attention, so we hypothesized that it could be detected outside of conscious awareness.”
To test this, participants performed a classic attentional task. They fixated a cross in the center of a computer screen while a pair of faces was briefly displayed, one on each side of the cross. On every trial one face was the participant’s own face and the other was a stranger’s face. Participants were instructed to keep their attention on the central cross and ignore peripheral images.
In half of the trials the faces were clearly visible; in the other half the faces were shown for only 32 milliseconds and immediately followed by a random visual mask. Masking is a standard technique for preventing stimuli from entering conscious awareness. The experimenters confirmed that the masking worked: participants could identify unmasked faces but could not consciously identify faces that were masked.
“Masking lets us model how the brain reacts to stimuli that reach sensory systems but fail to enter conscious awareness,” says coauthor Micha Bola, an expert in unconscious processing.
Throughout the task the researchers recorded participants’ brain activity with electroencephalography (EEG). They focused on lateralized EEG signals that reveal which side of visual space received attentional priority. “Directing attention to one side of space produces measurable asymmetries between the brain’s hemispheres,” explains coauthor Maria Nowicka, a PhD student at the Nencki Institute. “By analyzing these asymmetries, we could infer whether attention shifted toward the left or right face on each trial.”
The neural data showed that participants’ attention was automatically drawn to their own face, even when they were instructed to ignore the images. Crucially, this automatic attention shift occurred both when faces were consciously visible and when they were masked and not consciously identified.
“Even when participants did not report seeing their own face, their brain directed attention to the side where it appeared,” Wójcik says. “This indicates that the brain can detect identity-related information about a face without conscious recognition. In other words, conscious awareness is not strictly necessary for the recognition-related processes that capture attention.”
Previous demonstrations of unconscious attentional capture typically used simple visual features, such as the color of an object among distractors. This study extends the phenomenon to far more complex stimuli: whole faces that require detailed, multi-element analysis to recognize.
“Our results suggest that the unconscious mind can handle more detailed, high-level representations than previously assumed,” Bola notes. “Self-related stimuli such as one’s own face appear to be privileged at early stages of processing and can trigger automatic attention shifts without conscious detection.”
The authors acknowledge several open questions. Future research must determine whether the effect depends on recognizing one’s specific identity or simply on extremely high familiarity with a visual stimulus. They also plan to examine whether preferential unconscious attention extends beyond faces to other complex objects tied to the self.
Funding: The study was supported by the National Science Centre Poland (Grant 2015/19/B/HS6/01258 to A. Nowicka and Grant 2015/17/D/HS6/00269 to M. Bola). M. Bola also received a stipend from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (555/STYP/11/2016).
Source: Anna Mikulak – APS
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Abstract for “Unconscious Detection of One’s Own Image” by Michał J. Wójcik, Maria M. Nowicka, Michał Bola, and Anna Nowicka in Psychological Science. Published February 20, 2019.
doi: 10.1177/0956797618822971
APS. “You Recognize Your Face Even When You Don’t ‘See’ It.” NeuroscienceNews. 26 February 2019.
Abstract
Unconscious Detection of One’s Own Image
The study tested whether one’s own face captures bottom-up attention automatically, even without conscious identification. Using a dot-probe paradigm with electrophysiological recordings, participants (N = 18) viewed lateralized pairs of faces (self vs. other) presented either masked or unmasked. Behavioral analysis confirmed that masked faces were not consciously identified. Electrophysiological results revealed a clear N2 posterior-contralateral (N2pc) component — a neural marker of attentional shifts — in both masked and unmasked conditions, indicating that one’s own face automatically attracted attention when processed unconsciously. The findings (a) demonstrate that self-related information receives enhanced processing at early, preconscious stages, (b) identify complex identity-related features that drive automatic attention capture, and (c) provide further evidence for a dissociation between attention and consciousness.