Abstract
Emotional faces are detected faster and more accurately than neutral faces. We estimated its cognitive process by analyzing reaction times and accuracy obtained in detecting a target face with emotional expressions or a face with those anti-expressions, which are usually categorized as emotionally neutral, within a crowd of normal neutral faces with the diffusion model. Results showed that the drift rate, which reflects the speed of information accumulation, and the threshold separation, which are related to information amount to be considered, were greater for emotional faces than faces with anti-expressions. They also indicated that the non-decisional time associated with attentional allocation before information accumulation processing was shorter for faces with emotional expressions than those with anti-expressions. These results suggest that rapid and accurate detection of emotional facial expressions is implemented by the cognitive processing with accelerated and adequate information accumulation that is promoted by enhanced attentional allocation.
