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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Investigating the Neural Mechanisms of Aware and Unaware Fear Memory with fMRI
Published on: October 6, 2011
Visual awareness and the detection of fearful faces
Luiz Pessoa1, Shruti Japee, Leslie G Ungerleider
1Department of Psychology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA. pessoa@brown.edu
Abstract:
A commonly held view is that emotional stimuli are processed independently of awareness. Here, the authors parametrically varied the duration of a fearful face target stimulus that was backward masked by a neutral face. The authors evaluated awareness by characterizing behavioral performance using receiver operating characteristic curves from signal detection theory. Their main finding was that no universal objective awareness threshold exists for fear perception. Although several subjects displayed a behavioral pattern consistent with previous reports (i.e., targets masked at 33 ms), a considerable percentage of their subjects (64%) were capable of reliably detecting 33-ms targets. Their findings suggest that considerable information is available even in briefly presented stimuli (possibly as short as 17 ms) to support masked fear detection.
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