Unconscious processing of coarse visual information during anticipatory threat

Lojowska, Maria; Mulckhuyse, Manon; Hermans, Erno J.; Roelofs, Karin

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2019.01.018

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…One possibility is that beliefs about bad agents in general are more uncertain and volatile, due to threat-evoked arousal. This possibility is consistent with work demonstrating that threatening cues enhance attention and accelerate information processing (Lojowska et al, 2019;Robinson et al, 2013). If interacting with a threatening agent destabilizes beliefs about them in general, beliefs about that bad agent's non-moral traits (e.g., competence) should also be more volatile than beliefs about a good agent's non-moral traits.…”

Section: Beliefs About 'Bad' Agents Are More Uncertain and Volatile Than Beliefs About 'Good'supporting

confidence: 82%

The relational logic of moral inference

Crockett

Everett

Gill

et al. 2021

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology

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How do we make inferences about the moral character of others? Here we review recent work on the cognitive mechanisms of moral inference and impression updating. We show that moral inference follows basic principles of Bayesian inference, but also departs from the standard Bayesian model in ways that may facilitate the maintenance of social relationships. Moral inference is not only sensitive to whether people make moral decisions, but also to features of decisions that reveal their suitability as a relational partner. Together these findings suggest that moral inference follows a relational logic: people form and update moral impressions in ways that are responsive to the demands of ongoing social relationships and particular social roles. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of moral cognition and identify new directions for research on human morality and person perception.

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Section: Beliefs About 'Bad' Agents Are More Uncertain and Volatile Than Beliefs About 'Good'supporting

confidence: 82%

The relational logic of moral inference

Crockett

Everett

Gill

et al. 2021

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology

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“…Attentive immobility during post-encounter threat is usually accompanied by a co-activation of sympathetic (e.g., resulting in increased skin conductance and pupil width) and parasympathetic branches (e.g., provoking heart rate deceleration/bradycardia) of the autonomic nervous system (Volchan et al, 2017), which then switches to a sympathetically driven heart rate acceleration when fightflight reactions are necessary (Fanselow & Lester, 1988;Mobbs et al, 2020). Thereby, bradycardia has been linked to optimized sensory uptake and action preparation, suggesting attentive immobility to constitute an active preparatory state (Gladwin et al, 2016;Lojowska et al, 2015Lojowska et al, , 2019Merscher et al, 2022;Rösler & Gamer, 2019). A recently discovered oculomotor pattern in humans during post-encounter threat seems to support this notion, potentially also constituting a component of the defense state of attentive immobility.…”

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confidence: 99%

Fear lies in the eyes of the beholder—Robust evidence for reduced gaze dispersion upon avoidable threat

Merscher,

Gamer

2023

Psychophysiology

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A rapid detection and processing of relevant information in our environment is crucial for survival. The human eyes are drawn to social or threatening stimuli as they may carry essential information on how to behave appropriately in a given context. Recent studies further showed a centralization of gaze that reminded of freezing behaviors in rodents. Probably constituting a component of an adaptive defense mode, centralized eye movements predicted the speed of motor actions. Here we conducted two experiments to examine if and how these presumably survival‐relevant gaze patterns interact. Subjects viewed images including social, that is, faces (Experiment 1, N = 50) or threatening stimuli, that is, snakes or spiders (Experiment 2, N = 50) while awaiting an inevitable (shock), no (safety), or an avoidable shock (flight) they could escape from by a fast button press. The social and threatening cues within the scenes differed in their distance from the image center and we acquired eye‐tracking and autonomic physiological data. Although we observed an initial orienting toward social and threatening stimulus aspects, this exploration pattern vanished towards the end of flight trials when a pronounced centralization of gaze emerged. Replicating previous findings, the amount of this center bias predicted the speed of motor reactions, and we observed a concurrent activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Taken together, the exploration of potentially relevant cues seems to be part of a reflexive‐orienting response regardless of contextual valence. However, centralization of gaze may be a threat‐specific action‐preparatory response that occurs across a wide range of stimulus contexts.

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“…On the contrary, this ability might be crucial in stress-free situations, as for instance in a social context in which recognizing the face of a friend within a crowd would bring direct social benefits. Accordingly, rapid visual detection of threats rely on automatic processing of their coarse visual features (Lojowska, Mulckhuyse, Hermans, & Roelofs, 2019) while vagal is associated with facial recognition . Regarding memory discrimination, distinguishing highly similar memory traces should also only be relevant in an unthreatening context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%