Unconscious prioritization for face-to-face people.
Journal of experimental psychology. General May 1, 2024 Yingtao Fu, Mei Zhou, Jifan Zhou et al. 4 citations
Facing pairs of human heads gain privileged access to conscious awareness compared to nonfacing pairs, even when presented outside awareness. Eleven experiments using a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm showed that two human faces facing each other broke into awareness faster than nonfacing pairs. This advantage could not be explained by low-level or mid-level visual features. Disrupting holistic processing of the two agents significantly reduced the facing advantage. The effect was specific to human agents and did not occur with daily objects, directional arrows, or nonhuman animals. These results suggest that social information, specifically the facingness between two individuals, can be integrated unconsciously and influences what reaches conscious awareness.