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The determinants of consciousness of human faces

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 194–199 (2018)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 19 January 2018

This article has been updated

Abstract

From what we see to what we hear and from how we feel to what we think, our conscious experiences play an important role in shaping our lives. Because we become aware of only a small subset of our ongoing cognitive and perceptual processes1,2,3,4, explicating the determinants of conscious experiences is a crucial step towards understanding human behaviour. Here we develop a computational data-driven approach for studying the determinants of consciousness and we use it to investigate what is arguably the most important social stimulus: the human face5,6,7. In six experiments with 174 participants, we used this method to uncover a reliable dimension that determines the speed with which different faces reach conscious awareness. This dimension correlates strongly with the perceived power/dominance of a face. We show that the dimension cannot be explained by low-level visual factors and does not describe conscious processing, thereby suggesting that it captures the process of prioritization for consciousness. By visualizing the dimension, we are able to produce a vivid depiction of what unconscious processes prioritize for conscious processing. We propose this method as a means to study the contents and neural correlates of conscious experiences across various domains.

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Fig. 1: Experimental paradigm and examples of stimuli.
Fig. 2: Visualization of the priority dimension.
Fig. 3: Correlations with the two summary dimensions of judgements of social traits.
Fig. 4: Experiment 3 results.

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  • 19 January 2018

    In the version of this Letter originally published, the image of the face in Fig. 1c was mistakenly visible but should have been blended into the pattern. This has now been corrected.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (grant no. 2013417 to R.R.H. and A.T.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, the decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Yaniv Abir

  2. Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Asael Y. Sklar

  3. Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

    Ron Dotsch

  4. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Alexander Todorov

  5. Department of Psychology and The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Ran R. Hassin

Authors
  1. Yaniv Abir
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  2. Asael Y. Sklar
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  3. Ron Dotsch
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  4. Alexander Todorov
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  5. Ran R. Hassin
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Contributions

Y.A., A.Y.S. R.D. A.T. and R.R.H. developed the main ideas of this research programme. Y.A. and A.Y.S. programmed the experiments. Y.A. ran the experiments and analysed data. R.D. contributed analysis methods and scripts. Y.A. and R.R.H. wrote the manuscript, and R.D., A.Y.S. and T.D. provided extensive feedback on the writing.

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Correspondence to Yaniv Abir or Ran R. Hassin.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0291-2.

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Supplementary results, Supplementary methods, Supplementary references, Supplementary Figures 1–2

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Abir, Y., Sklar, A.Y., Dotsch, R. et al. The determinants of consciousness of human faces. Nat Hum Behav 2, 194–199 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0266-3

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