Associations with monetary values do not influence access to awareness for faces.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Social Psychology

Background:

• Human faces convey crucial social information, potentially granting them privileged access to awareness.
• Previous studies suggest emotional faces gain faster awareness, but this is confounded by stimulus characteristics.
• This research aims to isolate social relevance from physical features.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if learned behavioral relevance enhances face stimuli's access to awareness.
• To determine if conditioning monetary outcomes to faces influences their pre-conscious processing.
• To disentangle the effects of learned value from inherent stimulus properties on visual awareness.

Main Methods:

• Classical conditioning was used to associate face stimuli with monetary rewards or punishments.
• Continuous flash suppression (CFS), a binocular rivalry technique, probed the time for faces to enter awareness.
• Participants' awareness thresholds for faces were measured before and after the conditioning procedure.

Main Results:

• Participants successfully learned the associations between faces and monetary outcomes.
• Faces with high monetary value did not enter visual awareness significantly faster than faces with low monetary value post-conditioning.
• This effect was observed for both rewarding and aversive outcomes.

Conclusions:

• Learned behavioral relevance, even with monetary value, did not confer privileged access to awareness for face stimuli.
• Complex stimulus processing, potentially required for identity assessment, may be a bottleneck at pre-conscious stages.
• The findings challenge the notion that all socially or behaviorally relevant stimuli automatically gain faster access to conscious perception.