Automatic and controlled attentional orienting in the elderly: A dual-process view of the positivity effect

Gronchi, Giorgio; Righi, Stefania; Pierguidi, Lapo; Giovannelli, Fabio; Murasecco, I.; Viggiano, Maria Pia

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.02.008

Cited by 35 publications

(54 citation statements)

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“…One important explanation for this finding may be that it is vital for an organism to attend to information that is of high importance for behavioral goals, because it will assist in guiding both actions and thoughts [ 70 , 71 ]. Thus, emotional facial expressions, which are known to convey a high adaptive value in signaling crucial social information, undergo preferential perceptual processing [ 70 , 72 , 73 ]. Experiments of the neural correlate of consciousness in the context of binocular rivalry could help clarify the debate as to whether positive and negative content modulates the conscious perception differently [ 74 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatially Filtered Emotional Faces Dominate during Binocular Rivalry

et al. 2020

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The present investigation explores the role of bottom-up and top-down factors in the recognition of emotional facial expressions during binocular rivalry. We manipulated spatial frequencies (SF) and emotive features and asked subjects to indicate whether the emotional or the neutral expression was dominant during binocular rivalry. Controlling the bottom-up saliency with a computational model, physically comparable happy and fearful faces were presented dichoptically with neutral faces. The results showed the dominance of emotional faces over neutral ones. In particular, happy faces were reported more frequently as the first dominant percept even in the presence of coarse information (at a low SF level: 2–6 cycle/degree). Following current theories of emotion processing, the results provide further support for the influence of positive compared to negative meaning on binocular rivalry and, for the first time, showed that individuals perceive the affective quality of happiness even in the absence of details in the visual display. Furthermore, our findings represent an advance in knowledge regarding the association between the high- and low-level mechanisms behind binocular rivalry.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatially Filtered Emotional Faces Dominate during Binocular Rivalry

et al. 2020

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“…If angry and neutral faces compete for attention, angry faces are the more threatening stimulus class. If neutral faces are presented simultaneously with happy faces, however, neutral faces are the more threatening stimulus class (see also Gronchi et al, 2018 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It occurs after all: Attentional bias towards happy faces in the dot-probe task

Wirth

Wentura

2020

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Many studies have shown that not only threatening but also positive stimuli capture visual attention. However, in the dot-probe task, a common paradigm to assess attention to emotional stimuli, usually no bias towards happy faces occurs. Here, we investigated whether such a bias can occur and, if so, under which conditions. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether the bias is contingent on the simultaneous presentation of distractor stimuli with the targets. Participants performed a dot-probe task with either stand-alone targets or targets that were accompanied by distractors. We found an attentional bias towards happy faces that was not moderated by target type. To rule out perceptual low-level confounds as the cause of the bias towards happy faces, Experiments 2a and 2b comprised dot-probe tasks with inverted face cues. No attentional bias towards inverted happy faces occurred. In Experiment 3, we investigated whether a bias towards happy faces is contingent on a social-processing mode. Participants performed a dot-probe task with socially meaningful (schematic faces) or socially meaningless (scrambled schematic faces) targets. Again, a bias towards happy faces, which was not moderated by target type, occurred. In Experiment 4, we investigated the attentional bias towards happy faces when another highly relevant expression was present. Participants performed a dot-probe task with both happy and angry face cues. A significant attentional bias towards emotional faces occurred that did not differ between both cue emotions. These results suggest that happy faces are sufficiently relevant for observers to capture attention in the dot-probe task.

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“…Foremost, the measurements of amygdala activity depend on the sluggish BOLD signal which is unable to dissociate temporally early from late processes. Other studies using EEG or rapid stimulus presentations have demonstrated that a bias towards positive information in older age occurs during relatively early time windows (Gronchi et al, 2018;Houston et al, 2018;Kennedy et al, 2019;Mienaltowski et al, 2011). Future work may utilize these temporally precise methods to test our prediction that, in older age, positive compared to negative interpretations of dualvalence ambiguity involve relatively early processes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Positivity effect in aging: Evidence for the primacy of positive responses to emotional ambiguity

Petro

Basyouni

Neta

2020

Preprint

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Older compared to younger adults show greater amygdala activity to positive emotions, and are more likely to interpret emotionally ambiguous stimuli (e.g., surprised faces) as positive. While some evidence suggests this positivity effect results from a relatively slow, top-down mechanism, others suggest it emerges from early, bottom-up processing. The amygdala is a key node in rapid, bottom-up processing and patterns of amygdala activity over time (e.g., habituation) can shed light on the mechanisms underlying the positivity effect. Younger and older adults passively viewed neutral and surprised faces in an MRI. Only in older adults, we found that amygdala habituation was associated with the tendency to interpret surprised faces as positive or negative (valence bias), where a more positive bias was associated with greater habituation. Interestingly, although a positive bias in younger adults was associated with slower reaction times, consistent with an initial negativity hypothesis in younger adults, older adults showed faster ratings of positivity. Together, we propose that there may be a switch to a primacy of positivity in aging.

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Automatic and controlled attentional orienting in the elderly: A dual-process view of the positivity effect

Cited by 35 publications

References 50 publications

Spatially Filtered Emotional Faces Dominate during Binocular Rivalry

Spatially Filtered Emotional Faces Dominate during Binocular Rivalry

It occurs after all: Attentional bias towards happy faces in the dot-probe task

Positivity effect in aging: Evidence for the primacy of positive responses to emotional ambiguity

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