Implicit emotional processing in peripheral vision: behavioral and neural evidence

Abstract

Emotional facial expressions (EFE) are efficiently processed when both attention and gaze are focused on them. However, what kind of processing persists when EFE are neither the target of attention nor of gaze remains largely unknown. Consequently, in this experiment we investigated whether the implicit processing of faces displayed in far periphery could still be modulated by their emotional expression. Happy, fearful and neutral faces appeared randomly for 300 ms at four peripheral locations of a panoramic screen (15 and 30° in the right and left visual fields). Reaction times and electrophysiological responses were recorded from 32 participants who had to categorize these faces according to their gender. A decrease of behavioral performance was specifically found for happy and fearful faces, probably because emotional content was automatically processed and interfered with information necessary to the task. A spatio-temporal principal component analysis of electrophysiological data confirmed an enhancement of early activity in occipito-temporal areas for emotional faces in comparison with neutral ones. Overall, these data show an implicit processing of EFE despite the strong decrease of visual performance with eccentricity. Therefore, the present research suggests that EFE could be automatically detected in peripheral vision, confirming the abilities of humans to process emotional saliency in very impoverished conditions of vision.