Facial expression influences face identity recognition during the attentional blink.

Abstract

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.

Negative Emotional Valence Intensity Affects Visual Target Detection in the Information Encoding Process

“…The interaction between Valence level and Lag was not significant (F (4, 76) = 1.07, p = .38, η p Results from Experiment 2 indicated a processing advantage for angry faces in target detection compared to neutral faces within the RSVP stream. These results replicated previous studies (e.g., Bach, Schmidt-Daffy, & Dolan, 2014;Luo, Feng, He, Wang, & Luo, 2010). Therefore, the accurate detection of threat-related stimuli (i.e., angry and fearful faces) was observed compared to neutral stimuli (see LeDoux, 1996 for a review).…”

“…However, participants were required to perceive all faces presented after T1 faces. The task difficulty would be high compared to the previous studies (e.g., Bach et al, 2014). According to this task difficulty, angry faces would be easy to detect compared with neutral faces regardless negative emotional valence intensity.…”

N170 sensitivity to facial expression: A meta-analysis

“…In particular, studies using the dot-probe task found preferential attention to angry faces with masked presentations Mogg and Bradley, 1999; But see Koster et al, 2007). Moreover, emotional facial expressions have been found to reduce the size of the attentional blink in healthy participants (e.g., Bach et al, 2014;Vermeulen et al, 2009; but see Luo et al, 2010), or to be more resistant to extinction in neglect patients (e.g., Fox, 2002;Vuilleumier and Schwartz, 2001). Finally, the time needed to detect emotional facial expressions in visual search paradigms seems to be independent from the number of distracters (e.g., Hansen and Hansen, 1988;Fox et al, 2000;Frischen et al, 2008; but see Nummenmaa and Calvo, 2015).…”

Attentional Bias towards Threatening and Neutral Facial Expressions in High Trait Anxious Children

“…These were similar to the scrambled face distracters used in previous research involving adults (e.g., Maratos, 2011;Maratos et al, 2008), with the exception that they had been simplified (by the removal of two facial features) to control for task difficulty following piloting. Other AB studies employing face stimuli have also included scrambled images as the distracters (e.g., Asplund, Fougnie, Zughni, Martin, & Marois, 2014;Bach, Schmidt-Daffy, & Dolan, 2014). Stimulus presentation was controlled with Inquisit™ (www.millisecond.com) utilising an Acer Aspire laptop (model number: AS5633QLMi) with a 15.4-inch screen.…”

“…It is postulated that the AB is caused by focusing attentional resources (e.g., attentional selection, working memory encoding, episodic registration and response selection) completely on the first target (T1), thus rendering resources temporarily unavailable for processing the T2 within this short time frame (Dux & Marois, 2009). However, when the T2 is emotionally salient, particularly threatening, it has been found that the AB effect is reduced; that is, participants are able to report the T2 picture or word with greater accuracy as it "breaks through" the blink (e.g., Bach, Schmidt-Daffy, & Dolan, 2014;Maratos, Mogg, & Bradley, 2008;Srivastava & Srinivasan, 2010;Yerys et al, 2013). In a second version of this paradigm (the emotional attentional blink paradigm), the emotionality of one or more task-irrelevant distracter stimuli is manipulated, rather than the target or targets.…”