Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects 
of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces

Eiserbeck, Anna; Enge, Alexander; Rabovsky, Milena; Rahman, Rasha Abdel

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2023.103629

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons272293

Enge, Alexander
Department of Psychology, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany;
Max Planck Research Group Learning in Early Childhood, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.24.432562v3
(Preprint)

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

Eiserbeck_pre.pdf
(Preprint), 3MB

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Eiserbeck, A., Enge, A., Rabovsky, M., & Rahman, R. A. (2024). Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces. Consciousness and Cognition, 117: 103629. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2023.103629.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000B-1E90-1

Abstract

Not all visual stimuli processed by the brain reach the level of conscious perception. Previous research has shown that the emotional value of a stimulus is one of the factors that can affect whether it is consciously perceived. Here, we investigated whether social-affective knowledge influences a face’s chance to reach visual consciousness. Furthermore, we took into account the impact of facial appearance. Faces differing in facial trustworthiness (i.e., being perceived as more or less trustworthy based on appearance) were associated with neutral or negative socially relevant information. Subsequently, an attentional blink task was administered to examine whether the manipulated factors affect the faces’ chance to reach visual consciousness under conditions of reduced attentional resources. Participants showed enhanced detection of faces associated with negative as compared to neutral social information. In event-related potentials (ERPs), this was accompanied by effects in the time range of the early posterior negativity (EPN) component. These findings indicate that social-affective person knowledge is processed already before or during attentional selection and can affect which faces are prioritized for access to visual consciousness. In contrast, no clear evidence for an impact of facial trustworthiness during the attentional blink was found.