Top-down enhancement of nonconscious gaze perception by working memory representations of social cues

The perception of eye gaze plays a pivotal role in human social interactions, which even occurs outside conscious awareness. However, whether such nonconscious gaze perception is susceptible to top-down cognitive processes, like working memory (WM), remains unclear. Using a delayed match-to-sample paradigm, we investigated the WM modulation on the perception of eye gaze rendered invisible through the continuous flash suppression (CFS) technique. Our results revealed that the suppressed eye gaze gained prioritized access to consciousness when its direction matched that of the face held in WM. This effect did not emerge when the sample faces were only passively viewed rather than actively memorized, ruling out simple perceptual priming. More importantly, head orientation representations in WM could also facilitate the breakthrough of directionally congruent gaze stimuli, while such facilitation was not observed for WM representations of nonsocial cues, such as arrows. The current study demonstrates that WM representations of social cues can act as a top-down mechanism to enhance nonconscious gaze perception, highlighting the existence of a specialized mechanism tuned to the processing of social signals.