The perception of visual emotion: Comparing different measures of awareness

Remigiusz Szczepanowski , Jakub Traczyk , Michał Wierzchoń , Axel Cleeremans

Abstract

Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings (CRs), with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale (PAS), through which participants categorize ‘‘raw’’ visual experience, and post-decision wager- ing (PDW), which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures sug- gested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explana- tions of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives.