Emotional sounds guide visual attention to emotional pictures: An eye-tracking study with audio-visual stimuli.

Gerdes, Antje B. M.; Alpers, Georg W.; Braun, Hanna; Köhler, Sabrina; Nowak, Ulrike; Treiber, Lisa

doi:10.1037/emo0000729

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 96 publications

(158 reference statements)

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“…Our findings confirmed that positive natural sounds were preferentially processed over neutral auditory information and guide auditory or visual spatial attention. These results aligned with previous findings on negative auditory attentional bias (Asutay and Västfjäll, 2015;Wang et al, 2019a,b;Bonmassar et al, 2020) or negative visual attention bias (Harrison and Davies, 2013;Gerdes et al, 2014Gerdes et al, , 2020Burra et al, 2019). In the first two experiments, we also found that participants exhibited a similar response pattern to positive and negative sounds; in other words, participants showed attentional bias toward emotional sounds.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…Similarly, there were more studies on attentional bias toward visual emotional stimuli than on attentional bias toward emotional auditory information (e.g., Sheppes et al, 2013;Torrence et al, 2017). In fact, auditory sounds also convey emotionally relevant information and interact with vision to provide an appropriate judgment of the emotional qualities of a situation (Gerdes et al, 2014(Gerdes et al, , 2020Concina et al, 2019). Natural sounds in everyday life, such as screams, moans, cheers, applause, barks, and chirps, often contain emotional information and can carry biologically significant emotional information (Armony and LeDoux, 2010;Lepping et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2019b).…”

Section: Attentional Bias For Positive Emotional Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If you hear the familiar call of friends, you will immediately look toward them with a smile. In other words, sounds serve as warnings or rewarding signals in daily life that can be critical for survival and finetune our actions (Harrison and Davies, 2013;Gerdes et al, 2020;McDougall et al, 2020). A recent study has investigated auditory attentional bias employing white noise as negative auditory cue (Wang et al, 2019a), but white noise lacks ecological validity.…”

Section: Attentional Bias For Positive Emotional Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The issue of cross-modal interactions in spatial attention between vision and audition has been addressed only more recently (Van Vleet and Robertson, 2006;Arieh and Marks, 2008;Blurton et al, 2015). Furthermore, recent studies have shown that negative auditory cues guide auditory or visual spatial allocation of attention (Peschard et al, 2017;Carlson et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2019a;Gerdes et al, 2020) or influence semantic processing (Gao et al, 2020). It has been found that emotional visual cues also modulate auditory spatial attention (Harrison and Woodhouse, 2016).…”

Section: The Cross-modal Attentional Bias Toward Emotional Auditory I...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Emotional attention refers to the tendency to give preference to processing emotional information over neutral information (Vuilleumier, 2005;Yiend, 2010;Pourtois et al, 2013;Gerdes et al, 2020). The ability to detect and respond to threats in the natural world is of vital importance for adaptive behavior, survival across species Wang et al 10.3389/fnhum.2022.949655 (LeDoux, 1996Silstona and Mobbs, 2018;Kreutzmann et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Auditory and cross-modal attentional bias toward positive natural sounds: Behavioral and ERP evidence

Wang

Tang

Zhang

et al. 2022

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Recently, researchers have expanded the investigation into attentional biases toward positive stimuli; however, few studies have examined attentional biases toward positive auditory information. In three experiments, the present study employed an emotional spatial cueing task using emotional sounds as cues and auditory stimuli (Experiment 1) or visual stimuli (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3) as targets to explore whether auditory or visual spatial attention could be modulated by positive auditory cues. Experiment 3 also examined the temporal dynamics of cross-modal auditory bias toward positive natural sounds using event-related potentials (ERPs). The behavioral results of the three experiments consistently demonstrated that response times to targets were faster after positive auditory cues than they were after neutral auditory cues in the valid condition, indicating that healthy participants showed a selective auditory attentional bias (Experiment 1) and cross-modal attentional bias (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3) toward positive natural sounds. The results of Experiment 3 showed that N1 amplitudes were more negative after positive sounds than they were after neutral sounds, which further provided electrophysiological evidence that positive auditory information enhances attention at early stages in healthy adults. The results of the experiments performed in the present study suggest that humans exhibit an attentional bias toward positive natural sounds.

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