摘要：  PURPOSE: Previous evidence demonstrates that faces with direct, relative to averted, eye gaze could gain prioritized access to visual awareness during continuous flash suppression (CFS). However, the nonconscious encoding of the directions of averted eye gaze remains controversial.
METHODS: Here we adopted breaking-CFS paradigm to explore whether averted eye gaze with different directions could be discriminated unconsciously by presenting suppressed gaze cues adjacent to visible yet task-irrelevant contexts (namely, pictures of neutral objects).
RESULTS: Results showed that faces looking at the contexts emerged from suppression faster than faces looking at the opposite direction, suggesting that direction-congruent gaze cues facilitate the processing of invisible faces. However, this gaze congruency effect disappeared when the face and the context were separated by the fixation (thus on different sides of the display), indicating that spatial proximity may be necessary for the integration of the invisible gaze and the visible context.
CONCLUSIONS: To sum up, these results clearly show that averted gaze directions could be unconsciously decoded. Invisible gaze toward nearby contexts may boost the suppressed faces into visual awareness.

关键词: nonconscious, eye gaze, context, continuous flash suppression, breaking-CFS paradigm

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