ArticleeLife2019
Emotional faces guide the eyes in the absence of awareness.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Introduction to the Special Issue: Eye movements as windows to the mind: The integration of eye movements, perception, attention, and cognition-Honoring the contributions of Eileen Kowler.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Can the visual system explicitly represent distributions of emotional expressions?Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- The right eye for fixations: Eye asymmetries modulate gaze patterns towards speakers.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- How do Faces Influence Behavior? A Proposal for Distinguishing between Mechanisms that Involve Cognitive inferences, Emotional Feelings, and Unconscious Affective Reactions.Affective science · 2026Review
- Conscious awareness, sensory integration, and evidence accumulation in bodily self-perception.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Temporal attention and oculomotor effects dissociate distinct types of temporal expectation.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Perceptual learning improves discrimination but does not reduce distortions in appearance.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Eyes on the past: Gaze stability differs between temporal expectation and temporal attention.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Minimal exposure durations reveal visual processing priorities for different stimulus attributes.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Emotion and anxiety interact to bias spatial attention.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Auditory guidance of eye movements toward threat-related images in the absence of visual awareness.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Unconscious processing of happy faces correlates with prosocial tendency but not extraversion.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Effects of emotional content on social inhibition of gaze in live social and non-social situations.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Piecing together the puzzle of emotional consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Review
- Spontaneous instrumental avoidance learning in social contexts.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Low-spatial-frequency information facilitates threat detection in a response-specific manner.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Continuous flash suppression: Known and unknowns.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Review
- Oculomotor freezing reflects tactile temporal expectation and aids tactile perception.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Predictions from masked motion with and without obstacles.PloS one · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The ability to act quickly to a threat is a key skill for survival. Under awareness, threat-related emotional information, such as an angry or fearful face, has not only perceptual advantages but also guides rapid actions such as eye movements. Emotional information that is suppressed from awareness still confers perceptual and attentional benefits. However, it is unknown whether suppressed emotional information can directly guide actions, or whether emotional information has to enter awareness to do so. We suppressed emotional faces from awareness using continuous flash suppression and tracked eye gaze position. Under successful suppression, as indicated by objective and subjective measures, gaze moved towards fearful faces, but away from angry faces. Our findings reveal that: (1) threat-related emotional stimuli can guide eye movements in the absence of visual awareness; (2) threat-related emotional face information guides distinct oculomotor actions depending on the type of threat conveyed by the emotional expression.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.