Neural processing of lateralised task-irrelevant fearful faces under different awareness conditions

The neural fate of task-irrelevant emotional faces under different awareness conditions is poorly understood. Here, we examined the electrophysiological activity during an experiment where the location of target information (contrast-induced line) was manipulated orthogonally to the location of task-irrelevant fearful faces, under subliminal or supraliminal viewing conditions. We found that only target lines elicited an N2-posterior-contralateral (N2pc), indexing spatial attention shifting, in the supraliminal condition. No N2pc was found for the targets in the subliminal condition or for task-irrelevant fearful faces in either conditions. However, the mere presence of a fearful face enhanced early neural activity between 200 and 300 ms only in the subliminal condition. Additionally, the presence of a target line, but not a fearful face, enhanced the P3. Our results suggest that the N2pc is dependent on visual awareness and task-relevancy of the information and that laterally-presented task-irrelevant fearful expressions can be processed without awareness during early visual processing.