Affective blindsight: are we blindly led by emotions?Response to Heywood and Kentridge (2000).

activation has been demonstrated in the absence of conditioned fear, subjects have not been required to make a forced-choice response about the nature of the unseen expression. That is, they were not engaged in the sort of guesswork undertaken by blindsight patients. It is plausible that GY, a much-practised observer, is able to monitor his auto-nomic responses and use them to mediate above-chance performance in the discrimination of facial expression. However , the differential responses of the amygdala to different facial expressions 2 is consistent with its role in the processing of at least some facial expressions. The rapidity with which the responses to unmasked fear-conditioned stimuli desensitize 12 leaves open the possibility that repeated presentation could mitigate against GY's performance. Moreover , it remains an interesting possibility that an improvement in performance might have been obtained had GY been asked to make a reflexive response, such as a key press, which is less likely than verbalization to invoke reflective conscious processes. The genuine guesses of an uninformed conscious system might potentially interfere with the stimulus-driven responses of the putative col-licullar circuit. We will have to wait for further experiments to answer this question. of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. A subcortical pathway to the right amygdala mediating 'unseen' fear. role of facial movement and the relative importance of upper and lower areas of the face. perception of happy and angry expressive behaviors by 7-month-old infants. Child Dev. of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala. recognition after bilateral amygdala damage. such as personal identity, gender and facial speech are not observed 2. This pattern is consistent with the explanation suggested by Heywood and Kentridge that the biological or ecological salience of a stimulus is more important than the degree of visual complexity per se when deciding whether a given stimulus will support blindsight. However, if this were the only critical factor one might expect facial speech to support blindsight. Indeed, natural language, certainly when taken at the level of basic phoneme and syllable discrimination , is an integral part of our basic biological make-up. So it was something of a surprise that we were unable to find any indication of a capacity for discriminating or identifying facial speech in blindsight patients. One possible explanation rests upon the size of the stimuli used. There is evidence that spatial resolution is poor in …