Emotion-attention resource competition in early visual cortex follows emotional cue extraction V Bekhtereva, M Müller |
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Institute for Psychology, University of Leipzig, Germany
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| When allocating attention to the world, visual stimuli compete for limited neural processing resources. In our previous studies, we found that emotional stimuli have an advantage in this competition. We investigated the time course of competition between distracting task-irrelevant emotional background images (IAPS) and a to-be-attended visual foreground task. After approximately 400ms, more attentional resources are withdrawn from the foreground task to background affective than to neutral images, which is reflected in a significant drop in the steady state visual evoked potential (SSVEP). The extraction of the emotional affect preceded this amplitude reduction, as indicated in an early posterior negativity (EPN; ~240ms). However, for faces, emotional extraction may occur earlier, with effects of emotion seen in the face-specific N170. If affective modulation of SSVEP amplitudes follows emotional cue extraction, then it should occur earlier for faces than for IAPS images. We confirmed more negative deflections for emotional stimuli in the EPN (~330ms) to IAPS and the N170 (~175ms) to faces. Furthermore, SSVEP amplitudes dropped significantly more for emotional stimuli at approximately 200ms with faces but not until approximately 500ms for IAPS images. Thus, the time course of competition bias seems to be linked to the latency of emotional cue extraction. |
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