The Visual Impact Of Gossip

摘要: • Gossip is a form of social information about who is friend and who is foe.• In the lab, people readily learn affective value; faces paired with “gossip”(eg “hit a small child”) are evaluated as negative up two days after minimal learning conditions (1).• We used binocular rivalry to explore whether gossip would influence how faces are represented in visual consciousness.• Binocular rivalry occurs when dissimilar images are presented to each eye (2). Input from one eye is consciously experienced (seen) while the other image is suppressed (remains unseen). After a few seconds, the suppressed image becomes dominant (and the dominant image becomes suppressed). Over time people experience the two percepts alternating.• By measuring the length of dominance, it is possible to determine which visual input the brain is selecting for conscious experience.(2)