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Ou M, Peng W, Zhang W, Ouyang M, Liu Y, Lu K, Zeng X, Yuan J. The Role of In-Group and Out-Group Facial Feedback in Implicit Rule Learning. Behav Sci (Basel) 2023; 13:963. [PMID: 38131819 PMCID: PMC10741090 DOI: 10.3390/bs13120963] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/12/2023] [Revised: 10/29/2023] [Accepted: 11/21/2023] [Indexed: 12/23/2023] Open
Abstract
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.
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Affiliation(s)
- Meijun Ou
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China; (M.O.); (W.P.); (W.Z.); (Y.L.); (K.L.); (X.Z.)
| | - Wenjie Peng
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China; (M.O.); (W.P.); (W.Z.); (Y.L.); (K.L.); (X.Z.)
| | - Wenyang Zhang
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China; (M.O.); (W.P.); (W.Z.); (Y.L.); (K.L.); (X.Z.)
| | - Muxin Ouyang
- Psychology Department, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, USA;
| | - Yiling Liu
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China; (M.O.); (W.P.); (W.Z.); (Y.L.); (K.L.); (X.Z.)
| | - Keming Lu
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China; (M.O.); (W.P.); (W.Z.); (Y.L.); (K.L.); (X.Z.)
| | - Xiangyan Zeng
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China; (M.O.); (W.P.); (W.Z.); (Y.L.); (K.L.); (X.Z.)
| | - Jie Yuan
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China; (M.O.); (W.P.); (W.Z.); (Y.L.); (K.L.); (X.Z.)
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Lanfranco RC, Rabagliati H, Carmel D. The importance of awareness in face processing: A critical review of interocular suppression studies. Behav Brain Res 2023; 437:114116. [PMID: 36113728 DOI: 10.1016/j.bbr.2022.114116] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/15/2021] [Revised: 08/15/2022] [Accepted: 09/12/2022] [Indexed: 10/14/2022]
Abstract
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.
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Affiliation(s)
- Renzo C Lanfranco
- Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
| | - Hugh Rabagliati
- Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
| | - David Carmel
- Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom; School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
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Kim M, Kim J, Kim J, Jeong B. Diffusion model-based understanding of subliminal affective priming in continuous flash suppression. Sci Rep 2021; 11:11534. [PMID: 34075140 PMCID: PMC8169665 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-90917-w] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/22/2021] [Accepted: 05/19/2021] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Affective states influence our decisions even when processed unconsciously. Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a new variant of binocular rivalry that can be used to render the prime subliminal. Nonetheless, how prior information from emotional faces suppressed by CFS influences subsequent decision-making remains unclear. Here, we employed a CFS priming task to examine the effect of the two main types of information conveyed by faces, i.e., facial identity and emotion, on the evaluation of target words as positive or negative. The hierarchical diffusion model was used to investigate the underlying mechanisms. A significant interaction effect on response time was observed following the angry face prime but not the happy or neutral face primes. The results of the diffusion model analyses revealed that the priming effects of facial identity were mapped onto the drift rate and erased the 'positive bias' (the processing advantage of positive over negative stimuli). Meanwhile, the positive emotional faces increased the nondecision time in response to negative target words. The model-based analysis implies that both facial identity and emotion are processed under CFS.
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Affiliation(s)
- Minchul Kim
- Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering (GSMSE), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea
- Department of Radiology, Kangbuk Samsung Hospital, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea
| | - Jeeyeon Kim
- Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering (GSMSE), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea
| | - Jaejoong Kim
- Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering (GSMSE), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea
| | - Bumseok Jeong
- Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering (GSMSE), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea.
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Jessen S, Grossmann T. The developmental origins of subliminal face processing. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 2020; 116:454-460. [PMID: 32659286 DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.07.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/13/2019] [Revised: 02/18/2020] [Accepted: 07/08/2020] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
Sensitive responding to facial information is of key importance during human social interactions. Research shows that adults glean much information from another person's face without conscious perception, attesting to the robustness of face processing in the service of adaptive social functioning. Until recently, it was unclear whether such subliminal face processing is an outcome of extensive learning, resulting in adult face processing skills, or an early defining feature of human face processing. Here, we review recent research examining the early ontogeny and brain correlates of subliminal face processing, demonstrating that subliminal face processing: (1) emerges during the first year of life; (2) is multifaceted in response to transient (gaze, emotion) and stable (trustworthiness) facial cues; (3) systematically elicits frontal brain responses linked to attention allocation. The synthesized research suggests that subliminal face processing emerges early in human development and thus may play a foundational role during human social interactions. This offers a fresh look at the ontogenetic origins of unconscious face processing and informs theoretical accounts of human sociality.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sarah Jessen
- Department of Neurology, University of Lübeck, Germany.
| | - Tobias Grossmann
- Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, 310 Gilmer Hall, 485 McCormick Rd, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA; Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
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Danger is in the eyes of the beholder: The effect of visible and invisible affective faces on the judgment of social interactions. Cognition 2020; 203:104371. [PMID: 32569893 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104371] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/28/2020] [Revised: 06/02/2020] [Accepted: 06/04/2020] [Indexed: 11/22/2022]
Abstract
Previous studies demonstrated that observation of facial expressions can modulate threat detection while looking at neutral or emotion-related scenes. Similarly, stimuli presented outside conscious awareness could influence social judgments of neutral novel stimuli. The two-fold aim of this study was: i) to evaluate whether observation of seen emotional faces could affect the judgment of social interactions without contextual cues (visible prime condition), and ii) whether this effect could also emerge when the emotional faces were made not visible by means of continuous flash suppression (invisible prime condition). We found that both seen and unseen faces are able to affect the judgment of ambiguous social interactions although this effect was particularly evident when affective faces were clearly visible. The present findings supported the idea that both conscious and unconscious processing of emotional faces have an important role in modulating perceivers' affective state and their judgment of social interactions.
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Yuan J, Hu X, Chen J, Bodenhausen GV, Fu S. One of us? how facial and symbolic cues to own- versus other-race membership influence access to perceptual awareness. Cognition 2018; 184:19-27. [PMID: 30557747 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.12.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/30/2018] [Revised: 12/05/2018] [Accepted: 12/05/2018] [Indexed: 10/27/2022]
Abstract
Information that conveys racial group membership plays a powerful role in influencing people's information processing including perceptual, memory and evaluative judgments. Yet whether own- and other-race information can differentially impact people's perceptual awareness at a preconscious level remains unclear. Employing a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, we investigated whether compared with other-race stimuli, participants' own-race stimuli would be prioritized to gain privileged access to perceptual awareness. Across five experiments (N = 136), we firstly found that participants' own-race faces enjoyed privileged access to perceptual awareness (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2-5, we employed an associative training task to establish associations between otherwise arbitrary visual stimuli and own- vs. other-racial groups. Although otherwise arbitrary visual stimuli were prioritized to represent one's own race (vs. other-race) during the training, own- and other-race representing stimuli did not differ in their potency in entering perceptual awareness. This dissociation was further corroborated by Bayesian analyses and an internal meta-analysis. Taken together, our findings suggest that people's perceptual expertise with their own-race members' faces plays a determining role in shaping perceptual awareness. In contrast, newly learned race-representing stimuli did not influence early perceptual selection processes as indicated by the time they take to emerge into perceptual awareness.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jie Yuan
- Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China; State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China; Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China; Department of Psychology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
| | - Xiaoqing Hu
- Department of Psychology, The State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; HKU-Shenzhen Institute of Research and Innovation, Shenzhen, China.
| | - Jian Chen
- School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia
| | | | - Shimin Fu
- Department of Psychology, Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, School of Education, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China.
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Yang YH, Yeh SL. Can emotional content be extracted under interocular suppression? PLoS One 2018; 13:e0206799. [PMID: 30419039 PMCID: PMC6231622 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0206799] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/20/2017] [Accepted: 10/21/2018] [Indexed: 12/02/2022] Open
Abstract
Previous studies showed that emotional faces break through interocular suppression more easily compared to neutral faces under the continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm. However, there is controversy over whether emotional content or low-level properties contributed to the results. In this study, we directly manipulated the meaningfulness of facial expression to test the role of emotional content in breaking CFS (b-CFS). In addition, an explicit emotion judgment for different facial expressions (happy, neutral, and fearful) used in the b-CFS task was also conducted afterwards to examine the relationship between b-CFS time and emotion judgment. In Experiment 1, face orientation and luminance polarity were manipulated to generate upright-positive and inverted-negative faces. In Experiment 2, Asian and Caucasian faces were presented to Taiwanese participants so that these stimuli served as own-race and other-race faces, respectively. We found robust face familiarity effects in both experiments within the same experimental framework: upright-positive and own-race faces had shorter b-CFS times than inverted-negative and other-race faces, respectively. This indicates potential involvement of high-level processing under interocular suppression. In Experiment 1, different b-CFS times were found between emotional and neutral faces in both upright-positive and inverted-negative conditions. Furthermore, with sufficient duration (1000 ms) participants could still extract emotional content in explicit valence judgment even from inverted-negative faces, though with a smaller degree than upright-positive faces. In Experiment 2, differential b-CFS times were found between emotional and neutral faces with own-race but not other-race faces. Correlation analyses from both experiments showed that the magnitude of emotion judgment was correlated with b-CFS time only for familiar (upright-positive / own-race) but not unfamiliar (inverted-negative / other-race) faces. These results suggest that emotional content can be extracted under interocular suppression with familiar faces, and low-level properties in unfamiliar faces may play a major role in the b-CFS time.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yung-Hao Yang
- Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Su-Ling Yeh
- Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
- Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
- Neurobiology and Cognitive Science Center, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
- Center for Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Robotics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
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Affiliation(s)
- Severi Luoto
- English, Drama and Writing Studies, University of AucklandAuckland, New Zealand.,School of Psychology, University of AucklandAuckland, New Zealand
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