Title

Red Diffuse Light Suppresses The Accelerated Perception Of Fear

Keywords

Action; Emotion; Evolution; Magnocellular

Abstract

Prioritization of affective events may occur via two parallel pathways originating from the retina-a parvocellular (P) pathway projecting to ventral-stream structures responsible for object recognition or a faster and phylogenetically older magnocellular (M) pathway projecting to dorsal-stream structures responsible for localization and action. It has previously been demonstrated that retinal exposure to red diffuse light suppresses M-cell neural activity. We tested whether the fast propagation along the dorsal-action pathway drives an accelerated conduction of fear-based content. Using a visual prior-entry procedure, we assessed accelerated stimulus perception while either suppressing the M pathway with red diffuse light or leaving it unaffected with green diffuse light. We show that the encoding of fearful faces is accelerated, but not when M-channel activity is suppressed, revealing a dissociation that implicates a privileged neural link between emotion and action that begins at the retina. © 2010 The Author(s).

Publication Date

7-1-2010

Publication Title

Psychological Science

Volume

21

Issue

7

Number of Pages

992-999

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610371966

Socpus ID

77954823814 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/77954823814

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