Hazard levels of warning signal words modulate the inhibition of return effect: evidence from the event-related potential P300

Abstract

Warning signal words are often used to convey valuable information about potential dangers in everyday life. In this study, we explored whether and how the hazard level of warning signal words modulated participants' attention to subsequent targets. Event-related potentials with high temporal resolution were employed in a cue-target paradigm. In this task, warning signal words with different hazard levels were used as cues. Participants were required to judge whether targets were presented on the screen horizontally or vertically. We found an inhibition of return (IOR) effect, i.e., participants had longer reaction times to validly cued targets than to invalidly cued targets. Accordingly, the IOR effect was reflected by a smaller P300 amplitude for invalidly cued targets compared to validly cued targets. Furthermore, the IOR effect was eliminated when the cues were high-hazard words. The dampening effect on the P300 was eliminated when the cues were high-hazard warning signal words. The lack of an IOR was attributed to participants' attentional bias to high-hazard stimuli, which are difficult for participants to disengage their attention from. The current study suggests that warning signal words are a particular type of stimulus that can override the IOR effect. Warning signal words with a high hazard level are more effective in successfully alerting people to risk in a hazardous environment.

The Hazard Perception for the Surrounding Shape of Warning Signs: Evidence From an Event-Related Potentials Study

“…For instance, the communication-human information processing (C-HIP) model of warning signs suggested that there were four stages of information processing before action when people were seeing warning signs. The four stages included attention, comprehension, attitudes and beliefs, and motivation (Wogalter et al, 2005 ; Shang et al, 2015 ). By using Event-Related-Potential (ERP) techniques to study this issue, the researchers found that there were only two stages occurred in brain about dealing with the signal words in safety signs.…”

Neural Features of Processing the Enforcement Phrases Used during Occupational Health and Safety Inspections: An ERP Study

“…Hence, the words or phrases depicting such risky events induce more brain activation (a larger central-parietal late positive potential) for processing than that depicting safe events (Qin and Han, 2009 ). Other high-arousal stimuli including warning words (Ma et al, 2010 ; Shang et al, 2015 ), hazardous pictures (Ma et al, 2014 ), and threatening faces (Schupp et al, 2004 ) are relevant to human's safety and thus elicit larger P300. Qin and Han ( 2009 ) suggested that human can extrapolate the severe and dreadful consequence associated with the risky environmental event depicted by words/phrases and retrieve related emotional experience.…”

“…Words/phrases, pictures and facial expressions are commonly used as the stimuli to study the emotion processing (Schupp et al, 2004 ; Olofsson et al, 2008 ; Citron, 2012 ). As a powerful communication way, words or phrases are efficient to convey emotion contents and cognitive contents, which are valuable for human's life, for example, alert humans to hazard or risk in a hazardous environment (Qin and Han, 2009 ; Ma et al, 2010 ; Citron, 2012 ; Shang et al, 2015 ). Some words directly express the emotional state (e.g., happy, sad) while others denote the emotional connotation (e.g., reward, danger; Citron, 2012 ).…”

“…Some words directly express the emotional state (e.g., happy, sad) while others denote the emotional connotation (e.g., reward, danger; Citron, 2012 ). Several studies find words/phrases with emotional connotation do not merely modulate the allocation of attention, they can also convey some valuable information that lead to further cognitive processing (Qin and Han, 2009 ; Ma et al, 2010 ; Shang et al, 2015 ). For instance, the hazard information contained in the warning signal words (e.g., danger, urgent; Ma et al, 2010 ) and the environment risk information embedded in the words/phrases depicting environmental events (e.g., earthquake, air pollution; Qin and Han, 2009 ) can be identified and further evaluated by humans.…”

“…One of the ERP component associated with the emotional stimuli processing is the P300, which is a positive ERP component with a peak latency at around 300 ms after the onset of stimuli (Polich, 2007 ; Olofsson et al, 2008 ; Citron, 2012 ). Multiple studies indicate that P300 demonstrates the neural activity associated with cognitive operations and larger amplitude reflects the more attention resources engaged for stimuli processing (Kok, 2001 ; Polich, 2007 ; Schupp et al, 2007 ; Shang et al, 2015 ). Previous ERP studies about the emotion processing reveal that high-arousal stimuli often elicit enlarged P300 than low-arousal stimuli, indicating more attention resources are allocated to process the high-arousal stimuli (Delplanque et al, 2006 ; Olofsson et al, 2008 ; Citron, 2012 ; Recio et al, 2014 ; Delaney-Busch et al, 2016 ).…”