Effects of arousing emotional scenes on the distribution of visuospatial attention: changes with aging and early subcortical vascular dementia

Rösler, Alexander; Ulrich, Christian T.; Billino, Jutta; Sterzer, Phillip; Weidauer, Stefan; Bernhardt, Tanja; Steinmetz, Helmuth; Frölich, Lutz; Kleinschmidt, Andreas

doi:10.1016/j.jns.2004.11.007

Cited by 97 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In Experiment 4, lingering longer over pictures at encoding enhanced picture recognition but not picture-location conjunction memory. In addition, being shown on the screen at the same time as an arousing picture did not influence picture-location binding, despite the fact that previous research demonstrates that when a non-arousing and an arousing picture are shown together on a screen, people look longer at the arousing picture (e.g., Knight et al, under review;LaBar, Mesulam, Gitelman, & Weintraub, 2000;Rosler et al, 2005). Thus, looking time does not seem to influence picture-location binding, at least not in an incidental encoding task in which there is sufficient time (i.e., 2000 ms in Experiment 3) to look at both of the pictures on the screen.…”

Section: Mechanisms Of Arousal-enhanced Bindingmentioning

confidence: 87%

Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures

Mather

Nesmith

2008

Journal of Memory and Language

128

145

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Four experiments revealed arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures. After an incidental encoding task, participants were more likely to remember the locations of positive and negative arousing pictures than the locations of non-arousing pictures, indicating better binding of location to picture. This arousal-enhanced binding effect did not have a cost for the binding of nearby pictures to their locations. Thus, arousal can enhance binding of an arousing picture's content to its location without interfering with picture-location binding for nearby pictures. In addition, arousal-enhanced picture-location memory binding is not just a side effect of enhanced memory for the picture itself, as it occurs both when recognition memory is good and when it is poor. Keywords memory binding; arousal; emotion; location; interference Emotionally arousing events are more likely to be recalled later than non-arousing events. This emotional memory enhancement has been demonstrated in many lab studies using stimuli such as pictures and words (

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Section: Mechanisms Of Arousal-enhanced Bindingmentioning

confidence: 87%

Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures

Mather

Nesmith

2008

Journal of Memory and Language

128

145

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“…There is some evidence for example that the processing of highly negative, threatening stimuli is preserved with age (Mather and Knight, 2006;Rösler et al, 2005;Wright et al, 2006), while other studies have found an age-related reduction in negative emotional processing (Mather and Carstensen, 2005). It would be of interest therefore to examine age-related changes in negative emotional processing by isolating the contributory effects of valence and arousal.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Emotional arousal or intensity is thought to reflect the motivational value of an emotion (Lang et al, 1998), and has a strong effect on cognition, enhancing attention (Davis and Whalen, 2001;Fox et al, 2001) and also memory, via the increased activation of the amygdala and hippocampus (Cahill et al, 1996;Dolcos et al, 2004;Kensinger and Schacter, 2006;Richardson et al, 2004). There is some evidence that automatic arousal processing is relatively stable in old age, with older adults showing the same ability as young adults to detect high arousing stimuli (Leclerc and Kensinger, 2008), and threatening stimuli such as highly arousing negative scenes from the international affective picture system (IAPS) (Rösler et al, 2005), or threatening faces (Mather and Knight, 2006). There have been conflicting reports of older adults' autonomic response to emotional arousal however.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Healthy aging is associated with increased neural processing of positive valence but attenuated processing of emotional arousal: an fMRI study

Kehoe

Toomey²,

Balsters

et al. 2013

Neurobiology of Aging

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Arousal and valence play key roles in emotional perception, with normal aging leading to changes in the neural substrates supporting valence processing. The objective of this study was to investigate normal age-related changes in the neural substrates of emotional arousal processing. Twenty-three young and 23 older, healthy women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging as they viewed images which were neutral or positive in valence and which varied in arousal level from low to high. Using a parametric modulation approach, we examined how the blood oxygen-level dependent signal varied with single trial subjective ratings of valence and arousal, and whether this differed with age. In accordance with previous studies we found that the older group showed greater activation in response to positive valence, in the left amygdala, left middle temporal gyrus and right lingual gyrus. In contrast however, they showed reduced reactivity to emotional arousal, in occipital and temporal visual cortices bilaterally, the left inferior parietal cortex, and the supplementary motor area bilaterally. This study represents the first of its kind to clearly dissociate how aging affects the neural correlates of emotional arousal and valence. The changes in arousal processing may in part be mediated by the functional reorganization evident in the aging brain, such as reduced activation of the posterior cortices as described by the posterior-anterior shift in ageing (PASA) effect.

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“…During an unannounced, post-experiment word memory task, a positivity effect emerged in that older participants recognized a higher proportion of positive relative to negative words, suggesting possibly automatic, effortless processing of emotional information. Moreover, when measuring fixation preferences to emotional-neutral and emotional-emotional image pairs, Rosler A et al, [30] found no difference in positivity bias between a group of older healthy and a group of mildly cognitively impaired individuals: both preferred to fixate away from negative and towards neutral images as compared to young adults.…”

Section: Does the Positivity Bias Implicate Cognitive Effort?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming Younger and Older Adults’ Sentence Comprehension: Insights from Dynamic Emotional Facial Expressions and Pupil Size Measures

Carminati¹,

Knoeferle²

2016

TOPSYJ

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Background:Prior visual-world research has demonstrated that emotional priming of spoken sentence processing is rapidly modulated by age. Older and younger participants saw two photographs of a positive and of a negative event side-by-side and listened to a spoken sentence about one of these events. Older adults' fixations to the mentioned (positive) event were enhanced when the still photograph of a previously-inspected positive-valence speaker face was (vs. wasn't) emotionally congruent with the event/sentence. By contrast, the younger adults exhibited such an enhancement with negative stimuli only. Objective:The first aim of the current study was to assess the replicability of these findings with dynamic face stimuli (unfolding from neutral to happy or sad). A second goal was to assess a key prediction made by socio-emotional selectivity theory, viz. that the positivity effect (a preference for positive information) displayed by older adults involves cognitive effort. Method:We conducted an eye-tracking visual-world experiment. Results:Most priming and age effects, including the positivity effects, replicated. However, against our expectations, the positive gaze preference in older adults did not co-vary with a standard measure of cognitive effort -increased pupil dilation. Instead, pupil size was significantly bigger when (both younger and older) adults processed negative than positive stimuli. Conclusion:These findings are in line with previous research on the relationship between positive gaze preferences and pupil dilation. We discuss both theoretical and methodological implications of these results.

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Effects of arousing emotional scenes on the distribution of visuospatial attention: changes with aging and early subcortical vascular dementia

Cited by 97 publications

References 31 publications

Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures

Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures

Healthy aging is associated with increased neural processing of positive valence but attenuated processing of emotional arousal: an fMRI study

Priming Younger and Older Adults’ Sentence Comprehension: Insights from Dynamic Emotional Facial Expressions and Pupil Size Measures

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