Visual Perception of Threat: Structure, Dynamics, and Individual Differences

Efficient recognition of potential threats greatly enhances an organism’s chances of survival. This involves the ability to rapidly identify and react to clear, imminent danger, balanced by a more deliberative process when assessing ambiguous threat situations. While many models of affective perception posit that all negative stimuli are threatening and aversive, and thus should be treated similarly, our studies show that human observers keenly discriminate different types of negative stimuli, exhibiting distinct behavioral and neural response patterns. We have shown that humans rapidly extract the spatial and temporal qualities of threat from scene images to decipher the structure of the threat—whether a clear threat is present, the likelihood of physical harm, how imminent it is, and its spatial direction—whether it is aimed at the observer or someone else. These qualities can be quickly extracted from full-color scenes as well as from simple line drawings. Our findings in psychophysical and imaging studies examining the three major visual streams—the magnocellularMagnocellular pathway, parvocellularParvocellular pathway, and koniocellularKoniocellular pathway pathways—suggest that they may contribute to different phases of the threat perception process. Lastly, we will delve into how characteristics such as anxiety, sex, and hemispheric laterality affect behavioral and neural responses in perceiving threat.