Neural correlates of an early attentional capture by positive distractor words

Abstract

Exogenous or automatic attention to emotional distractors has been observed for emotional scenes and faces. In the language domain, however, automatic attention capture by emotional words has been scarcely investigated. In the current event-related potentials study we explored distractor effects elicited by positive, negative and neutral words in a concurrent but distinct target distractor paradigm. Specifically, participants performed a digit categorization task in which task-irrelevant words were flanked by numbers. The results of both temporo-spatial principal component and source location analyses revealed the existence of early distractor effects that were specifically triggered by positive words. At the scalp level, task-irrelevant positive compared to neutral and negative words elicited larger amplitudes in an anterior negative component that peaked around 120 ms. Also, at the voxel level, positive distractor words increased activity in orbitofrontal regions compared to negative words. These results suggest that positive distractor words quickly and automatically capture attentional resources diverting them from the task where attention was voluntarily directed.

Affective norms of 875 Spanish words for five discrete emotional categories and two emotional dimensions

“…The words were selected from the LEXESP (Sebastián-Gallés et al, 2000) and from prior studies by our group (Hinojosa, Carretié, Valcárcel, Méndez-Bértolo, & Pozo, 2009;Hinojosa, Méndez-Bértolo, & Pozo, 2010, 2012Hinojosa et al, 2015;Méndez-Bértolo, Pozo, & Hinojosa, 2011a). The selection of the words attempted to include as many words as possible with a marked affective value in addition to neutral words.…”

Time course of gender agreement violations containing emotional words

“…Regarding early effects, the most consistent finding is a modulation of the amplitude elicited by emotional words, as seen in a posterior negativity that peaks at around 200e300 ms (the so-called Early Posterior Negativity; Citron, 2012;Scott, O'Donnell, Leuthold, & Sereno, 2009). However, other early effects have also been found, such as in posterior positivities (P1) at around 80e120 ms (Bernat, Bunce, & Shevrin, 2001;Scott et al, 2009;Wong, Bernat, Snodgrass, & Shevrin, 2004), in negativities (N1) at around 100 ms (Bernat et al, 2001;Hinojosa et al, 2015;Hofmann, Kuchinke, Tamm, Võ, & Jacobs, 2009), and in a positivity, at around 200 ms (Bernat et al, 2001;Herbert, Kissler, Jungh€ ofer, Peyk, & Rockstroh, 2006). Although tasks and materials differ across experiments (see Citron, 2012 for a review), these early components are supposed to reflect automatic and effortless initial stages of detection and attention orientation.…”

“…As far as emotion is concerned, we focused on positive words, with a view to avoiding any 'negativity bias' in the gender violation task (Carreti e, Albert, L opez-Martín, & Tapia, 2009; Pratto & John, 1991). This will allow us to see whether emotional words embedded in sentential contexts show a behavioral facilitation effect as well as effects of attentional capture, as has been observed for emotional words in isolation (Citron, 2012;Citron et al, 2014a;Hinojosa et al, 2015;Kissler et al 2006), these in line with the predictions of the approachewithdrawal model of Robinson et al (2004).…”

“…However, these same components have also been associated with early lexical access (Citron, 2012;Scott et al, 2009), with amplitudes being sensitive to such variables as lexical frequency (Penolazzi, Hauk, & Pulvermüller, 2007) which, like recognition potential (Abdullaev & Posner, 1998), might be linked to activity in the visual word form area . In summary, these components seem to relate to an initial, automatic and implicit stage of emotional processing (Citron, 2012;Hinojosa, Martín-Loeches, & Rubia, 2001;Kissler et al, 2006), which appears to be related to exogenous attention (Hinojosa et al, 2015).…”

“…The choice of these temporal and topographic measures is based on well-defined criteria from the literature on components associated with language and emotional word processing, such as LAN and P600, and LPC (for reviews of the components and their topography, see Citron, 2012;Molinaro et al, 2011). It was also motivated by the modulation of early components observed in previous studies of emotional word processing (Bernat et al, 2001;Hinojosa et al, 2015;Hofmann et al, 2009;Scott et al, 2009;Wong et al, 2004). Taking into account that emotions can drive attention ( € Ohman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001), we included the MA region in the analysis of the 80e130 ms segment (Hillyard & Anllo-Vento, 1998).…”