Recognition accuracy of faces can be influenced by stimulating a specific part of the face-space with congruent or incongruent stimuli. For instance, visual stimuli can be used, which can differ in their affective contents. In two studies (N=50) we intended to reveal the effect of congruence on recognition speed and eye movements. We used a force-choice test combined with a go-nogo task. In the first experiment only incongruence in arousal enhanced the time necessary for recognition, incongruence in valence had no effect. However, semantic information from the images might have played some role. In contrast, in the second experiment where semantic information were excluded, incongruence of both arousal and valence decreased recognition speed, but only when the original valence were low, that is unpleasant primes in the learning phase were substituted pleasant ones in the test phase. Differences in fixation times between the familiar (i. e., target) and unfamiliar faces were the same in each condition in both studies.
This confirms the assumption that the affective content of visual stimuli activate a specific region of the face-space, which puts a cognitive load on recognition. This is in line with the notion of the dual-pathway processing of faces: the activation of the affective pathway is crucial. Nevertheless, both arousal and valence seems to be influential. The lack of difference between eye-movements across conditions suggests that incongruence effects are caused by pre-conscious integrations of information rather than attentional or encoding processes.