The Late Positive Potential Predicts Subsequent Interference with Target Processing

Abstract

The current study investigated the association between neural engagement with task-irrelevant images and subsequent interference with target processing using the Emotional Interrupt paradigm [Mitchell, D., Richell, R., Leonard, A., & Blair, R. Emotion at the expense of cognition: Psychopathic individuals outperform controls on an operant response task. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 115, 559, 2006]. Consistent with previous studies, PCA-derived factors corresponding to the early posterior negativity, P300, and late positive potential (LPP) were enhanced for emotional (i.e., both unpleasant and pleasant) compared with neutral distracters, and the P300 elicited by targets was smaller following emotional compared with neutral pictures. In addition, RTs were increased to targets that followed emotional pictures. Within-subject analyses demonstrated that slow trials were characterized by a smaller P300 and were preceded by pictures with a larger LPP. Additionally, between-subject analyses indicate that individuals with a larger LPP also demonstrated slower RTs to targets and reduced target-elicited P300s. All results were specific to the LPP and were not observed for either the early posterior negativity or the P300 elicited by task-irrelevant pictures. By relating the LPP to subsequent behavioral and ERP interference in both within- and between-subject analyses, the current study provides direct support for the notion that LPP indexes attentional engagement with visual stimuli that is uniquely associated with subsequent interference in terms of both RT slowing and P300 reduction to targets.

The fate of unattended stimuli and emotional habituation: Behavioral interference and cortical changes

“…In several previous studies, the emotional modulation of the LPP and the behavioral interference were used, to some extent, interchangeably to examine the effects of emotion on attention (De Cesarei & Codispoti, 2008;Erthal et al, 2005;Ihssen, et al, 2007;MacNamara & Hajack, 2009;Padmala & Pessoa, 2014;Schupp et., al., 2006), and it has also been suggested that these two indexes are correlated (Weinberg & Hajcak, 2011). The present study indicates that, although the LPP and RTs are both modulated by motivational significance (emotional arousal) during the viewing of novel pictures, they are differentially modulated by stimulus repetition, suggesting that they do not reflect the same process.…”

“…Although RTs are often used to index attention to emotional stimuli (Calvo et al, 2015;Ferrari, Bruno, Chattat, & Codispoti, 2016;Hartikainen et al, 2000;Padmala & Pessoa, 2014;Weinberg & Hajcak, 2011), they are executed after a sequence of processing stages following the actual attention allocation to the stimulus, and therefore several factors might affect behavioral interference. On the other hand, the LPP is a much more temporally proximal measure of the evaluative processes involved.…”

“…In terms of ERPs, it is well established that emotional pictures (pleasant and unpleasant) elicit a larger late positive potential (LPP) than neutral ones (Cuthbert, Schupp, Bradley, Birbaumer, & Lang, 2000;Johnston, Miller, & Burleson, 1986;Schupp, Flaisch, Stockburger, & Junghöfer, 2006), and this cortical modulatory effect has been interpreted as reflecting both the engagement of attentional resources by emotional stimuli and the activation of motivational systems (Ferrari, Bradley, Codispoti, & Lang, 2011;Schupp et al, 2006;Weinberg & Hajcak, 2011).…”

Emotion-induced blindness reflects competition at early and late processing stages: An ERP study

“…The LPP is larger for negative than for neutral pictures and also appears to be related to interference associated with irrelevant negative distractors (Weinberg & Hajcak, 2011). Most previous investigators did not comment on whether they also observed a posterior positivity following negative pictures that overlaps in time with the P3b, but it could have been overlooked because of this overlap.…”

Emotionally negative pictures increase attention to a subsequent auditory stimulus

“…Previous work in this area has shown that emotional stimuli will prime subsequent responses in a different sensory modality since stimuli in the same sensory modality are competing for limited processing resources (reviewed in Schupp et al, 2006). For example, cross modal studies show that emotional stimuli facilitate lexical decisions (Kissler and Koessler, 2011; but see Ihssen et al, 2007), enhance free recall (Herbert and Kissler, 2010), reduce response times (Scott et al, 2009;De Houwer et al, 2002;Jiang et al, 2007), improve identification of visual targets (Brosch et al, 2007(Brosch et al, , 2008Zeelenberg and Bocanegra, 2010; but see Weinberg and Hajcak, 2011), potentiate startle responses (Herbert and Kissler, 2010;reviewed in Lang et al, 1997b), augment the P1 ERP component during visual target detection (Brosch et al, 2009), and enhance touch sensation (Poliakoff et al, 2007). The motivational priming hypothesis expounded by Lang et al (1997b) particularly posits that priming will occur when there is a link or association with the emotional activation network.…”