Additive effects of emotional, endogenous, and exogenous attention: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Abstract

Please cite this article in press as: Brosch, T., et al. Selective attention is not a unitary construct, but is composed of several processes. Attention selection may be guided by low-level stimulus properties, by the emotional value of the stimulus, or more voluntarily by the goals and plans of the observer. Whether these three systems operate independently during attention selection or not remains a debated question. We report results from two studies investigating the extent to which these different attention mechanisms may interact with one another. Using a standard dot probe paradigm wherein effects of exogenous, emotional, and endogenous attention were orthogonally manipulated, we found attentional facilitation effects for each component, indicated by faster decision times for validly, as opposed to invalidly cued targets. Moreover, results confirmed that these three attentional effects added up in a linear fashion. Complementing ERP results allowed us to disentangle the respective contributions of the two reflexive, bottom-up attention processes (exogenous vs. emotional) by showing non-overlapping temporal loci for attentional effects related either to low-level physical properties or the emotional content of the stimulus. These findings suggest that multiple separate attention mechanisms can operate simultaneously to yield a rapid and efficient visual processing of various classes of potentially relevant stimuli.

Brain mechanisms for emotional influences on perception and attention: What is magic and what is not

“…Because the C1 component is thought to index the bottom-up retinotopic encoding of stimuli, and is typically impermeable to manipulations of endogenous or exogenous selective attention (see Martinez, et al, 1999;Hillyard & Anllo-Vento, 1998; but see Kelly, Gomez-Ramirez, & Foxe, 2008;Rauss, Pourtois, Vuilleumier, & Schwartz, 2009), these findings suggest that emotion control systems may operate partly independently of and during an earlier time window than the more classical bottom-up or top-down attention mechanisms (see Fig. 1; see also Brosch, et al, 2011). Moreover, these early emotion effects in primary visual cortex (triggered by the cue, i.e., a task-irrelevant fearful face) correlate with the degree of rapid spatial orienting towards the spatial location of emotional stimuli (as indexed by the amplitude of the P1 generated by the task-relevant target stimulus), suggesting a functional link between early neural increases in primary visual cortex and the subsequent deployment of spatial attention towards emotionally-salient events (see Pourtois, et al, 2004;Pourtois, Thut, et al, 2005).…”

“…4; Desimone & Duncan, 1995;Kastner & Ungerleider, 2000;Corbetta & Shulman, 2002;Woldorff, et al, 2004). This emotional gain control effect may therefore account for the more efficient processing of threat-related stimuli, in addition to or in parallel with any concurrent modulation by other endogenous (task-dependent) or exogenous (stimulus-driven) mechanisms of attention (see above; see also Brosch, et al, 2011).…”

“…As we will review hereafter, emotional effects on attention appear to share more similarities with a bottom-up than top-down process, although empirical data suggest that they may actually be better understood in terms of a separate, specialized control system (see Figures 1 and 4) that does not share all its functional and anatomical components with classical attention mechanisms Brosch, Pourtois, Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2011;Vuilleumier, 2009). Moreover, just like recent models of attention have emphasized a competitive integration between top-down and bottom-up effects on both exogenous (reflexive) and endogenous (voluntary) attention during stimulus processing (McMains & Kastner, 2011), it is likely that the effects of emotionally-relevant stimuli may also involve a balance between bottom-up and top-down processes, or that "exogenous" emotional responses also partly depend on "endogenous" emotional signals (e.g.…”

“…More direct evidence for additive effects comes from studies manipulating attention and emotion separately. For example, a recent study (Brosch, et al, 2011) used a dot probe paradigm (see Posner, et al, 1980) where a simple visual target (which could unpredictably appear on the right or left visual field) was preceded by three different types of cues: an endogenous/symbolic arrow pointing to one or the other side, an exogenous flash on one or the other side, and a face with either a fearful or neutral expression.…”

The Sixth Sense-Emotional Contagion; Review of Biophysical Mechanisms Influencing Information Transfer in Groups

“…It has been [31] suggested there are two separate neural systems the unconscious uses to scan faces; one system spots physiological features that are emotional (e.g., identity, gender, race), the other examines exterior or dynamic expressions (e.g., quick displays of emotions), their research proposes that these two neural systems interact in a bi-directional manner. It may be the system identifying stable difference may work first, then activating the dynamic system to examine the emotional state of the person found to be different.…”