PSC 154 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Blindsight, Emotion Recognition, Face Perception
Document Summary
Some patients with brain trauma can discriminate emotional stimuli that they report not to have seen. These patients claim not to be able to see anything, but perform well on emotion recognition tasks. For example by guessing" whether the stimulus expresses happiness or fear - a phenomenon known as affective blindsight . Affective blindsight patients show pupillary & facial emg responses to conscious. Subliminal presentation of eye whites activates the amygdala. 17ms presentation of eye - whites followed by a neutral face in the fmri scanner. Examined amygdala activation to different sized eye- whites. They found increased amygdala activation to subliminally presented larger eye- whites. More amygdala activation for bigger eye whites. Different effect only for eye whites, not eye blacks. Shows that people are tuned to how eyes show up on others. Even when it is outside of our awareness. Nonconscious presentations of emotional expressions can influence behavior. Even though it did not influence emotion.
