台大心理系

Destruction of the brain’s primary visual areas leads to blindness of cortical origin. Following bilateral destruction of the visual cortices, some patients remain capable of correctly guessing facial expressions of emotion despite a lack of awareness of having seen the stimuli. The brain regions and pathways involved in this so-called “affective blindsight” are still controversial and little is known about the speed at which this processing occurs. In this talk we will present a series of studies carried out on a cortically blind patient, as well as a group of healthy controls using EEG and fMRI. In these investigations, we present evidence against and in favor of a rapid subcortical pathway for unconscious processing of visual stimuli.