In everyday life, our preferences are governed by influences that we are frequently not aware of. Studies investigating visual subliminal priming have shown that emotions are particularly able to modulate the affective judgments both at a behavioural and neural level. In this study, we investigated whether emotional unconscious learning is a core feature of human development, by testing infants as young as 3 months of age on a subliminal affective priming task, in which infants were primed with subliminal happy and angry faces (Experiment 1) or subliminal neutral and scrambled faces (Experiment 2), followed by two neutral objects. We found that arousal to the neutral objects – as indexed through skin conductance – changed when they were primed with faces displaying emotional valence, and particularly anger, but not when the face had a neutral expression. This change in physiological state only partially corresponded to a change in explicit behaviour – as indexed through looking times – suggesting that emotional unconscious learning likely influences explicit behaviour at later stages of development, when subcortical-to-cortical connections have strengthened.

在日常生活中，我们的偏好受到我们经常不知道的影响的支配。调查视觉潜意识启动的研究表明，情绪特别能够在行为和神经层面调节情感判断。在这项研究中，我们通过在潜意识情感启动任务中测试年仅 3 个月大的婴儿来调查情绪无意识学习是否是人类发展的核心特征，其中婴儿以潜意识的快乐和愤怒的面孔为基础（实验 1）或潜意识中性和混乱的面孔（实验 2），然后是两个中性对象。我们发现对中性物体的唤醒——通过皮肤电导指数——在它们被面部表现出情绪效价，尤其是愤怒时发生了变化，但不是当脸上有中性表情的时候。生理状态的这种变化仅部分对应于外显行为的变化——通过观察时间进行索引——表明情绪无意识学习可能会影响发育后期的外显行为，此时皮质下到皮质的连接已经加强。