One of us? how facial and symbolic cues to own- versus other-race membership influence access to perceptual awareness

Modulation of the attentional response to baby schema by testosterone in pedohebephilic men and its relation to the nurturing system

Previous fMRI research found increased brain responses in men with pedophilic interest to non-sexual pictures of child and animal faces. This raised the question of whether an aberrant nurturing system could be linked to pedophilia. To further explore this hypothesis, 20 pedohebephilic and 23 teleiophilic men performed a target detection task with adult versus infant human and animal faces, which measured selective attention towards the baby schema by comparing reaction times to infant versus adult targets that were presented amongst distractors of the other category. Since the response to baby schema can be influenced by steroid hormones, saliva samples were additionally collected to determine endogenous testosterone, progesterone, estradiol and cortisol. Contrary to expectations, all men did not react faster to infant than adult faces. Yet, pedohebephilic men were more distracted by infant's faces than teleiophilic men. Pedohebephilic men with higher testosterone were faster in orienting attention to infant targets in the context of adult distractors. This association was not observed in teleiophilic men. Our results support the idea of an overactive nurturing system in pedophilia, which may be influenced by the endogenous testosterone level.

Intra-group differences in skin tone influence evaluative and perceptual face processing

In an exploration of colorist biases across native Melanesian participants, we employed a multi-method approach across three studies to examine evaluative and perceptual processing of 'lighter' and 'darker' non-Melanesian facial targets controlled for attractiveness, sex, and ethnicity. In Study 1, 305 participants evaluated facial attractiveness using surveys. In Study 2, 153 participants alternately mapped lighter and darker faces with positive and neutral attributes across brief Implicit Association Tests. In Study 3, 61 participants underwent a manual sorting task followed by a 'breaking' continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm to probe 'non-conscious' perceptual biases. Across evaluative measures, male and female respondents consistently preferred lighter-skinned, highly attractive male faces. During b-CFS, lighter and attractive opposite-sex faces entered awareness ('broke suppression') faster than their darker counterparts. We speculate that skin tone may operate as a perceptually salient cue in the presence of facial configurations signaling high reproductive potential.

The Role of In-Group and Out-Group Facial Feedback in Implicit Rule Learning

Implicit learning refers to the fact that people acquire new knowledge (structures or rules) without conscious awareness. Previous studies have shown that implicit learning is affected by feedback. However, few studies have investigated the role of social feedback in implicit learning concretely. Here, we conducted two experiments to explore how in-group and out-group facial feedback impact different difficulty levels of implicit rule learning. In Experiment 1, the Chinese participants in each group could only see one type of facial feedback, i.e., either in-group (East Asian) or out-group (Western) faces, and learned the implicit rule through happy and sad facial expressions. The only difference between Experiment 2 and Experiment 1 was that the participants saw both the in-group and out-group faces before group assignment to strengthen the contrast between the two group identities. The results showed that only in Experiment 2 but not Experiment 1 was there a significant interaction effect in the accuracy of tasks between the difficulty levels and groups. For the lowest difficulty level, the learning accuracy of the in-group facial feedback group was significantly higher than that of the out-group facial feedback group, whereas this did not happen at the two highest levels of difficulty. In conclusion, when the contrast of group identities was highlighted, out-group feedback reduced the accuracy of the least difficult task; on the contrary, there was no accuracy difference between out-group and in-group feedback conditions. These findings have extensively important implications for our understanding of implicit learning and improving teaching achievement in the context of educational internationalization.

The importance of awareness in face processing: A critical review of interocular suppression studies

Human faces convey essential information for understanding others' mental states and intentions. The importance of faces in social interaction has prompted suggestions that some relevant facial features such as configural information, emotional expression, and gaze direction may promote preferential access to awareness. This evidence has predominantly come from interocular suppression studies, with the most common method being the Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (bCFS) procedure, which measures the time it takes different stimuli to overcome interocular suppression. However, the procedures employed in such studies suffer from multiple methodological limitations. For example, they are unable to disentangle detection from identification processes, their results may be confounded by participants' response bias and decision criteria, they typically use small stimulus sets, and some of their results attributed to detecting high-level facial features (e.g., emotional expression) may be confounded by differences in low-level visual features (e.g., contrast, spatial frequency). In this article, we review the evidence from the bCFS procedure on whether relevant facial features promote access to awareness, discuss the main limitations of this very popular method, and propose strategies to address these issues.

Dimensions of Perception: 3D Real-Life Objects Are More Readily Detected Than Their 2D Images

Most of our interactions with our environment involve manipulating real 3D objects. Accordingly, 3D objects seem to enjoy preferential processing compared with 2D images, for example, in capturing attention or being better remembered. But are they also more readily perceived? Thus far, the possibility of preferred detection for real 3D objects could not be empirically tested because suppression from awareness has been applied only to on-screen stimuli. Here, using a variant of continuous flash suppression (CFS) with augmented-reality goggles ("real-life" CFS), we managed to suppress both real 3D objects and their 2D representations. In 20 healthy young adults, real objects broke suppression faster than their photographs. Using 3D printing, we also showed in 50 healthy young adults that this finding held only for meaningful objects, whereas no difference was found for meaningless, novel ones (a similar trend was observed in another experiment with 20 subjects, yet it did not reach significance). This suggests that the effect might be mediated by affordances facilitating detection of 3D objects under interocular suppression.