Conscious awareness is required for the perceptual discrimination of threatening animal stimuli: A visual masking and continuous flash suppression study.
We investigated if the subliminal processing of threatening animal (snakes and spiders) and neutral object (cars and houses) stimuli can influence the discrimination of a subsequent visible stimulus. The prime and target pair were either identical, of the same category but with different physical features, or different in category and physical features. In two experiments, participants discriminated the basic level category (e.g. snake vs. spider) of a visible target stimulus that had been preceded by a visible or perceptually invisible prime stimulus. One experiment used visual masking to render prime stimuli perceptually invisible and the other used continuous flash suppression (CFS). Priming effects were demonstrated in both experiments when the prime was visible but not when the prime was rendered perceptually invisible. These findings demonstrate that conscious awareness could be required in the perceptual discrimination of threatening animal and neutral object images at their specific basic level category.
['Cox|Emma J|EJ|', 'Sperandio|Irene|I|', 'Laycock|Robin|R|', 'Chouinard|Philippe A|PA|']
D000328:Adult D001364:Awareness D003243:Consciousness D004192:Discrimination, Psychological D005239:Fear D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual D010470:Perceptual Masking D012660:Semantics D013360:Subliminal Stimulation D055815:Young Adult
Conscious awareness Visual masking Priming Continuous flash suppression (CFS) Threat stimuli