Electrophysiological evidence for attentional capture by irrelevant angry facial expressions

Burra, Nicolas; Barras, Caroline; Coll, Sélim Yahia; Kerzel, Dirk

doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.08.008

Cited by 32 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…The missing petal of the target flower and the location of the target varied unpredictably. A distractor object (50% spider, 50% leaf) was present in twothirds of the trials, similar to previous studies on attentional capture (see Burra et al, 2016;Burra et al, 2017;Burra & Kerzel, 2013Hickey et al, 2006). On half of the distractorpresent trials, the target was on the vertical midline and the distractor on a lateral position, which elicited a lateralized component to the distractor but not to the target.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 84%

“…Using BrainVision Analyzer 2.1 (Brain Products, Gilching, Germany), data were filtered with a Butterworth zero-phase shift low-pass filter (40 Hz with 24 dB/oct.). In order to exclude eye movement, blinks or general artifacts, we used the same rejection criteria as in our prior study (Burra et al, 2016;Burra et al, 2017). On average, 15.9% of the trials were discarded.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because random swaps between target and distractor result in slower search times while fixed targets result in efficient search (Lamy & Yashar, 2008;Pinto, Olivers, & Theeuwes, 2005), one may conclude that easy search tasks allow for suppression while difficult search results in capture . With fixed targets and threatening faces as distractors, however, both suppression (Bretherton, Eysenck, Richards, & Holmes, 2017;Burra et al, 2017) and capture (Burra et al, 2016;Eimer & Kiss, 2007) were observed, showing that motivational value may sometimes prevent distractor suppression even when the target is perfectly predictable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…One possibility to measure attentional captured by a salient-but-irrelevant stimulus is the additional singleton paradigm, which assesses the precedence of stimulus-driven (bottom-up) attention over goal-driven (top-down) attention (Theeuwes, 1991). It was observed that irrelevant angry faces produced more interference than happy faces (Burra, Barras, Coll, & Kerzel, 2016; Burra, Coll, Hodsoll, Viding, & Lavie, 2011;Huang, Chang, & Chen, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Attentional suppression is delayed for threatening distractors

et al. 2019

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According to the threat-capture hypothesis, fear-related stimuli have a high attentional priority. As a result, irrelevant-but-salient stimuli interfere more with a visual search task when they are perceived as threatening. We investigated the neural basis for behavioral interference in conditions that promote attentional suppression of distracting stimuli (i.e., easy search with fixed target/distractor roles). In Experiment 1, participants discriminated the shape of a neutral target (a flower), which competed for selection with a threat-related (spider) or neutral (leaf) distractor. In line with prior results, we observed larger interference from spider than leaf distractors. At an electrophysiological level, we found that participants actively suppressed both distractors as evidenced by the presence of a posterior positivity between 200-300 ms, the PD. Critically, the PD was delayed with spider compared to leaf distractors. Further, in the spider distractor condition, the offset of the PD component correlated with response time to complete the search task when the spider was present. Experiment 2 was a control experiment where we confirmed that the results depended on the execution of the peripheral search task. When participants performed a localization task on the fixation cross, the decisive results from Experiment 1 were not replicated despite equal peripheral stimulation. Our results indicate that the behavioral delay incurred by threatening stimuli is accompanied by a delay of suppressive mechanisms. In contrast, we found no evidence for initial capture followed by suppression that may be predicted by hypervigilance-avoidance theory. Disgust 17.1 (5.4) 9.2 (5.2) 41.6 (6.8) Reaction Times and Accuracy. A one-way (distractor type: no distractor, spider distractor, leaf distractor), repeated-measures ANOVA revealed that RTs were shorter on distractor-absent than distractor-present trials (618, 640, and 633 ms for no distractor, spider distractor, and leaf distractor, respectively), F(2, 34) = 15.26, p < .001, ηp 2 = 0.473. Critically, a paired t-test revealed that RTs were longer with the spider than with the leaf distractor (640 vs. 633 ms), t(17) = 2.32, p = .03, Cohen's d = 0.55. Additionally, accuracy was lower in the distractor-present conditions (0.96, 0.95, 0.94 for no distractor, spider distractor, leaf distractor, respectively), F(2, 34) = 3.49, p = .042, ηp 2 = 0.171. However, there was no significant difference between spider and leaf distractors, t(17) = 1.22, p = 0.23. Electrophysiological results Global N2pc/PD Amplitudes (230-330 ms). The difference waves obtained by subtracting ipsi-from contralateral activity are shown in Figure 2A. The same ANOVA as above was conducted on mean difference amplitudes. A significant effect of distractor type was revealed, F(1.24, 21.10) = 49.15, p < .001, ηp 2 = .74. The voltage difference was negative to targets (-1.29 µV), consistent with an N2pc, but it was positive to spider (2.16 µV) and leaf (2.11 µV) distractors, consistent with a PD. There was no signi...

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 84%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Attentional suppression is delayed for threatening distractors

et al. 2019

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“…The fact that participants' attention was reallocated to an area allowing deeper analysis of the emotion could explain this result. Moreover, it is interesting to note that the eye area is specifically important for the attentional capture of angry faces (Burra, Barras, Coll, & Kerzel, 2016;Fox & Damjanovic, 2006;Weymar, Low, Ohman, & Hamm, 2011), the emotion tested in this experiment. Following the "intentional weighting principle" (Hommel, Memelink, Zmigrod, & Colzato, 2014;Memelink & Hommel, 2013), which states that cuing a feature dimension (for example by making it task relevant) increases the saliency of stimuli coded in this dimension, one can argue that the binding would be stronger when the feature of the task is somewhat related to the emotional discrimination or categorization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Audiomotor integration of angry and happy prosodies

Coll

Frühholz

Grandjean

2018

Psychological Research

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Different parts of our brain code the perceptual features and actions related to an object, causing a binding problem: how does the brain discriminate the information of a particular event from the features of other events? Hommel (1998) suggested the event file concept: an episodic memory trace binding perceptual and motor information pertaining to an object. By adapting Hommel's paradigm to emotional faces in a previous study (Coll & Grandjean, 2016), we demonstrated that emotion could take part in an event file with motor responses. We also postulate such binding to occur with emotional prosodies, due to an equal importance of automatic reactions to such events. However, contrary to static emotional expressions, prosodies develop through time and temporal dynamics may influence the integration of these stimuli. To investigate this effect, we developed three studies with task-relevant and -irrelevant emotional prosodies. Our results showed that emotion could interact with motor responses when it was task relevant. When it was task irrelevant, this integration was also observed, but only when participants were led to focus on the details of the voices, that is, in a loudness task. No such binding was observed when participants performed a location task, in which emotion could be ignored. These results indicate that emotional binding is not restricted to visual information but is a general phenomenon allowing organisms to integrate emotion and action in an efficient and adaptive way. We discuss the influence of temporal dynamics in the emotion-action binding and the implication of Hommel's paradigm.

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Introduction

McGrath¹

2019

Royal Rage and the Construction of Anglo-Norman Authority, C. 1000-1250

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Electrophysiological evidence for attentional capture by irrelevant angry facial expressions

Cited by 32 publications

References 79 publications

Attentional suppression is delayed for threatening distractors

Attentional suppression is delayed for threatening distractors

Audiomotor integration of angry and happy prosodies

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