Relative affective blindsight for fearful bodily expressions

Abstract

Nonconscious affective perception has repeatedly been shown for facial expressions but not for bodily expressions while being highly salient and known to influence our behavior towards others. Lau & Passingham[7] found a case of relative blindsight using a parametric masking design. We used a comparable approach to find this relative case of blindsight for affective information in which the affective information can be processed independently of visual awareness. Participants had to detect masked fearful bodily expressions among masked neutral bodily actions as distractors and subsequently the participants had to indicate their confidence. The onset between target and mask (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, SOA) varied from -50 to +133 milliseconds. D-prime as well as the confidence ratings showed that the bodies could be detected reliably in all SOA conditions. Importantly, a phenomenon which we coined relative affective blindsight was found, defined as two SOA conditions showing same d-prime values, while the confidence ratings differed.