In a new study, researchers report they were able to train unknowing volunteers to develop a mild but significant preference or dislike for faces that they had previously regarded neutrally.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Volunteers who started an experiment feeling neutral about certain faces they saw ended up unknowingly adopting the feelings that scientists induced via an MRI feedback technique, according to newly published research.
The study in PLOS Biology therefore suggests that there is a single region of the brain where both positive and negative feelings for faces take shape and provides the second demonstration this year that the MRI technique can be used to train a mental process in an unknowing subject. This spring, the team used the same method to associate the perception of color with the context of a pattern so strongly that volunteers saw the color when cued by the pattern, even if the color wasn’t really there.