Faces convey a wealth of information essential for social interaction. Their importance has prompted suggestions that some facial features may even be processed unconsciously. Evidence for such unconscious processing has predominantly come from the Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, which measures the time taken for images to overcome interocular suppression. For instance, prior work has found that suppressed upright faces and faces making eye contact reach awareness faster than inverted faces and faces looking away, respectively. However, we argue that from a signal detection standpoint, the b-CFS procedure suffers from important problems: Observers can decide how much information they receive before committing to a report, so their responses can be affected by differences in decision criteria; furthermore, b-CFS measures of detection may be confounded by identification processes. Therefore, having first replicated gaze-direction and face-orientation b-CFS findings, we developed a new procedure that addresses these problems by using predefined exposure durations and measuring sensitivity and decision criteria for both detection of suppressed stimuli (reporting their location on screen) and identification of those stimuli (reporting gaze direction). Importantly, we find higher detection sensitivity to both upright and direct-gaze (compared to inverted and averted-gaze) faces, with no criterion effects. For identification, however, we find both greater sensitivity and more liberal criteria in upright faces. Our findings demonstrate separable influences on detection and identification in the access of faces to awareness, as well as the importance of using methods that can dissociate perceptual and decisional processes.
This project involved two experiments. The data and analysis files are contained in the folders.