Emotional content of an image attracts attention more than visually salient features in various signal-to-noise ratio conditions

Pilarczyk, Joanna; Kuniecki, Michał

doi:10.1167/14.12.4

Cited by 47 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 96 publications

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“…The other 53 students (mean age = 19 years, 34 females, 32 Caucasians) participated in experiment 2 to test the effect of color. The sample size was comparable with that of similar previous studies (e.g., De Cesarei and Codispoti, 2008 ; Nummenmaa et al, 2010 ; Pilarczyk and Kuniecki, 2014 ). The participants for both experiments were representative in the same manner of the psychology major undergraduate population at Dartmouth College with respects to age, gender and ethnicity.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 79%

Distinct effects of contrast and color on subjective rating of fearfulness

Guo

Boguslavsky

et al. 2015

Front. Psychol.

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Natural scenes provide important affective cues for observers to avoid danger. From an adaptationist perspective, such cues affect the behavior of the observer and shape the evolution of the observer’s response. It is evolutionarily significant for individuals to extract affective information from the environment as quickly and as efficiently as possible. However, the nearly endless variations in physical appearance of natural scenes present a fundamental challenge for perceiving significant visual information. How image-level properties, such as contrast and color, influence the extraction of affective information leading to subjective emotional perception is unclear. On the one hand, studies have shown that visual perception and emotional perception seem to interact with each other at the earliest stages in cortical processing. On the other hand, it is important for high-level subjective ratings to be invariant to low-level visual properties. Using a psychophysical approach and signal detection theory (SDT), we tested how contrast and color influenced fearfulness ratings of a set of natural scene pictures that varied in contents and in levels of fearfulness. Image contrast influenced perceptual sensitivity but not the decision criterion of fearfulness rating, whereas color affected the decision criterion but not perceptual sensitivity. These results show that different low-level visual features contribute independently to sensitivity or decision criterion in affective perception, suggesting distinct interactions between visual cognition and affective processing. Specifically, our naturalistic approach using a novel stimulus set, combined with SDT, has demonstrated two dissociable types of cognitive mechanisms underlying how image-level properties leverage the extraction of affective information in natural vision.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 79%

Distinct effects of contrast and color on subjective rating of fearfulness

Guo

Boguslavsky

et al. 2015

Front. Psychol.

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“…Emotional stimuli may influence prospective memory through encoding or retrieval processes, or synergistically through both. The findings from the more general literature of emotion and cognition suggests that emotion is likely to improve the encoding process through enhanced attention and visual processing (Calvo & Lang, 2004;Dolan, 2002;Nummenmaa, Hyona, & Calvo, 2006;Phelps, Ling, & Carrasco, 2006;Pilarczyk & Kuniecki, 2014). Emotion can also enhance the memory consolidation of stimuli (Mather, 2007) by acitvating the amygdala (Hamann, 2001) and resulting in enhanced long-term (Hamann, Ely, Grafton, & Kilts, 1999) and short-term memory (Hamann & Mao, 2001, cited in Hamann, 2001).…”

Section: The Influence Of Emotion On Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of emotional cues on prospective memory: a systematic review with meta-analyses

Hostler

Wood

Armitage

2018

Cognition and Emotion

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Remembering to perform a behaviour in the future, prospective memory, is essential to ensuring that people fulfil their intentions. Prospective memory involves committing to memory a cue to action (encoding), and later recognising and acting upon the cue in the environment (retrieval). Prospective memory performance is believed to be influenced by the emotionality of the cues, however the literature is fragmented and inconsistent. We conducted a systematic search to synthesise research on the influence of emotion on prospective memory. Sixty-seven effect sizes were extracted from 17 articles and hypothesised effects tested using three meta-analyses. Overall, prospective memory was enhanced when positively-valenced rather than neutral cues were presented (d = 0.32). In contrast, negatively-valenced cues did not enhance prospective memory overall (d = 0.07), but this effect was moderated by the timing of the emotional manipulation. Prospective memory performance was improved when negatively-valenced cues were presented during both encoding and retrieval (d = 0.40), but undermined when presented only during encoding (d = -0.25). Moderating effects were also found for cue-focality and whether studies controlled for the arousal level of the cues. The principal finding is that positively-valenced cues improve prospective memory performance and that timing of the manipulation can moderate emotional effects on prospective memory. We offer a new agenda for future empirical work and theorising in this area.

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“…Relatedly, eye-movement studies have revealed (a) greater attentional capture by emotional relative to neutral scenes, when they are presented alone (Kissler & Keil, 2008) or simultaneously (Alpers, 2008;McSorley & van Reekum, 2013;Nummenmaa, Hyönä, & Calvo, 2006 in extrafoveal vision; and (b) selective orienting to extrafoveal scene areas depicting emotional objects relative to non-emotional objects within the same scene (Humphrey, Underwood, & Lambert, 2012;Niu, Todd, & Anderson, 2012;Pilarczyk & Kuniecki, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%