The eyes move towards fearful faces hundreds of milliseconds before they reach awareness

Do emotional faces have prioritized access to visual awareness? In the absence of awareness, emotional faces guide oculomotor responses contingent on their emotional expression, suggesting emotion processing in the absence of awareness as well as a dissociation of eye movements and visual awareness (Vetter, Badde, Phelps & Carrasco, 2019). However, it is unclear how early the eyes see emotional faces that reach awareness. Using continuous flash suppression, we rendered fearful and neutral faces invisible from observers’ awareness. The contrast of the face images slowly increased, and participants were instructed to press a key corresponding to the position of the face as soon as they started seeing something. In addition to the position of the face, participants reported its emotional expression, and the image’s visibility at the time they pressed the button. Meanwhile, we tracked observer’s eye movements. Our behavioral results show that fearful faces broke into awareness more often and earlier than neutral faces (in line with previous studies, e.g., Yang et al., 2007; Gray et al., 2013). Eye-tracking results show that the eyes moved several hundreds of milliseconds earlier towards suppressed fearful than towards suppressed neutral faces. Once participants’ gaze was centred on the face image, manual reaction times were identical for fearful and neutral faces. When the faces were superimposed on the flashing mask, and thus not suppressed from awareness, neither manual reaction times nor oculomotor responses differed between fearful and neutral faces. These novel results show that fearful faces have prioritized access to awareness while avoiding the potential confounds of decision criteria and response processes associated with classical breakthrough paradigms. We suggest that fearful faces’ advantage to guiding oculomotor responses in the absence of awareness might be the mechanism facilitating their perceptual detection.