Experimental design. The experiment had a blocked component involving five experimental conditions: sex task, bar-orientation task at easy, medium, and hard difficulty levels, and bars-only task. During the sex task, subjects attended the faces and determined whether they were male or female. During the bar-orientation conditions, subjects fixated the faces but indicated whether the peripheral bars were like oriented or not. During sex-task and bar-orientation blocks, neutral and fearful faces were shown in a random fashion (“event-related”). The bars-only condition involved the same difficulty as the hard bar-orientation condition but did not include faces. The order of the blocks was randomized. Stimuli are not drawn to scale.