Abstract
Pre-perceptual emotional processing is known to occur rapidly before perceptual processing. Facilitation effects in sensory processing due to pre-perceptual emotional processing can be observed in visual search or attentional blink tasks. However, previous event-related potentials studies have suggested that pre-perceptual emotional processing affects the lower-order stage of sensory processing, which differs from the processing involved in visual search or attentional blink tasks. Therefore, we investigated this facilitation using a masking paradigm. We found that the sensitivity of emotional stimuli was higher than that of neutral stimuli. From the correlations between amygdala activation and pre-perceptual emotional processing, the amygdala would be suggested to extract the feature related to emotional arousal from visual stimuli and affect the following various processes of perception.
