The fearful-face advantage is modulated by task demands: Evidence from the attentional blink.

Stein, Timo; Peelen, Marius V.; Funk, Johanna; Seidl, Katharina N.

doi:10.1037/a0017814

Cited by 36 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Over the past two decades, several studies have established that the AB effect can be observed with a wide variety of stimuli, such as symbols [3], pictures [4], faces [5] or words [6]–[8]. Typically, the AB occurs during a RSVP stream, but it can also be obtained with auditory [9], [10] or tactile paradigms [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional Blink Is Hierarchically Modulated by Phonological, Morphological, Semantic and Lexical Connections between Two Chinese Characters

Cao

Jin

et al. 2014

PLoS ONE

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The ability to identify the second of two targets (T2) is impaired if that target is presented less than ∼500 ms after the first (T1). This transient deficit is known as attentional blink (AB). Previous studies have suggested that the magnitude of the AB effect can be modulated by manipulating the allocation of attentional resources to T1 or T2. However, few experiments have used Chinese characters and words to explore this phenomenon. The existence of lexical, semantic, phonological and morphological connections between Chinese characters has been well established, and understanding these connections may improve our knowledge of reading Chinese. In this study, we employed varying connections between T1 and T2 and examined how these connections modulate the AB effect. We found that the strongest AB was observed when the two Chinese characters were completely unrelated, while the AB was reduced when T1 and T2 were phonologically, orthographically or semantically related and was almost completely eliminated when T1 and T2 were united in a lexical phrase. The order of activation between Chinese characters was identified as follows: (a) lexical phrases, (b) semantic connection, (c) morphological connection, (d) phonological connection and (e) unrelated words.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional Blink Is Hierarchically Modulated by Phonological, Morphological, Semantic and Lexical Connections between Two Chinese Characters

Cao

Jin

et al. 2014

PLoS ONE

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“…First, we were interested whether emotional expression in angry or happy face photographs can capture attention at all when it is task-irrelevant. In fact, for fearful faces there is mixed evidence (Milders et al, 2006; Stein, Zwickel, Ritter, Kitzmantel, & Schneider, 2009), and it is suggested that when they are task-relevant, attentional capture is not automatic but can be reduced by increasing distraction (Stein, Peelen, Funk, & Seidl, 2010). In a visual search task, attentional capture by irrelevant facial expression has been established for happy, but not angry or fearful expression (Hodsoll, Viding, & Lavie, 2011).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Facial expression influences face identity recognition during the attentional blink.

Bach¹,

Schmidt-Daffy²,

Dolan³

2014

Emotion

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Emotional stimuli (e.g., negative facial expressions) enjoy prioritized memory access when task relevant, consistent with their ability to capture attention. Whether emotional expression also impacts on memory access when task-irrelevant is important for arbitrating between feature-based and object-based attentional capture. Here, the authors address this question in 3 experiments using an attentional blink task with face photographs as first and second target (T1, T2). They demonstrate reduced neutral T2 identity recognition after angry or happy T1 expression, compared to neutral T1, and this supports attentional capture by a task-irrelevant feature. Crucially, after neutral T1, T2 identity recognition was enhanced and not suppressed when T2 was angry—suggesting that attentional capture by this task-irrelevant feature may be object-based and not feature-based. As an unexpected finding, both angry and happy facial expressions suppress memory access for competing objects, but only angry facial expression enjoyed privileged memory access. This could imply that these 2 processes are relatively independent from one another.

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“…It has been shown that fearful face perception is prioritized in that such faces are often perceived more easily or quickly (Milders et al , 2006; Phelps et al , 2006; Yang et al , 2007; Stein et al , 2009, 2010, 2014; Amting et al , 2010; Stienen and de Gelder, 2011). Yet, it was unclear whether such prioritized perception of fearful faces was merely due to bottom-up processing of low-level physical features (Yang et al , 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…attentional bink; Milders et al , 2006; Stein et al , 2009). Other studies have shown that fearful faces are more resistant to suppression by visual noise or dichoptic suppression (Yang et al , 2007; Amting et al , 2010; Stein et al , 2010, 2014; Stienen and de Gelder, 2011). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…It has been shown that fearful faces are more likely to reach conscious perception (Yang et al , 2007; Amting et al , 2010; Stein et al , 2010, 2014; Stienen and de Gelder, 2011), which in turn has been linked to metacognition (Lau and Rosenthal, 2011; Ko and Lau, 2012). Thus, we also speculated that fearful faces may have a prioritized access to the metacognitive system, such that fearful faces may be perceived with higher confidence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Is fear perception special? Evidence at the level of decision-making and subjective confidence

Koizumi

Mobbs

Lau³

2016

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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Fearful faces are believed to be prioritized in visual perception. However, it is unclear whether the processing of low-level facial features alone can facilitate such prioritization or whether higher-level mechanisms also contribute. We examined potential biases for fearful face perception at the levels of perceptual decision-making and perceptual confidence. We controlled for lower-level visual processing capacity by titrating luminance contrasts of backward masks, and the emotional intensity of fearful, angry and happy faces. Under these conditions, participants showed liberal biases in perceiving a fearful face, in both detection and discrimination tasks. This effect was stronger among individuals with reduced density in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region linked to perceptual decision-making. Moreover, participants reported higher confidence when they accurately perceived a fearful face, suggesting that fearful faces may have privileged access to consciousness. Together, the results suggest that mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex contribute to making fearful face perception special.

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The fearful-face advantage is modulated by task demands: Evidence from the attentional blink.

Cited by 36 publications

References 34 publications

Attentional Blink Is Hierarchically Modulated by Phonological, Morphological, Semantic and Lexical Connections between Two Chinese Characters

Attentional Blink Is Hierarchically Modulated by Phonological, Morphological, Semantic and Lexical Connections between Two Chinese Characters

Facial expression influences face identity recognition during the attentional blink.

Is fear perception special? Evidence at the level of decision-making and subjective confidence

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