Seeing food fast and slow: Arousing pictures and words have reverse priorities in accessing awareness

Previous studies have shown that stimuli triggering higher arousal (e.g., attractiveness) can access awareness faster than those triggering lower arousal, yet no studies have examined the effect of food calories. Since food brings us energy, satiety, and positive emotions, food stimuli bringing higher arousal would likely have higher priority in accessing awareness over those with lower arousal. We used high-calorie and low-calorie food stimuli as representatives for high and low arousal stimuli, respectively, based on the tight relationship between calorie and arousal. By adopting the breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, we had high-calorie and low-calorie food pictures or words presented dichoptically with dynamic Mondrian masks and measured the time for food stimuli to be released from suppression. Our results showed that high-calorie food pictures could access visual awareness faster than low-calorie food pictures (Experiment 1), and the reverse pattern was observed for food words (Experiment 2). We ruled out the possibility of the difference in low-level features (Experiment 3) and post-perceptual response bias (Experiment 4) as the causes for the observed b-CFS time differences. This study revealed the dissociation of the unconscious processing of pictures and words, which may rely on mechanisms related to attentional capture. High-arousing stimuli do not always enjoy priority in accessing visual awareness.