Reduction of interference effect by low spatial frequency information priming in an emotional Stroop task

Abstract

The affective prediction hypothesis assumes that visual expectation allows fast and accurate processing of emotional stimuli. The prediction corresponds to what an object is likely to be. It therefore facilitates its identification by setting aside what the object is unlikely to be. It has then been suggested that prediction might be inevitably associated with the inhibition of irrelevant possibilities concerning the object to identify. Several studies highlighted that the facilitation of emotional perception depends on low spatial frequency (LSF) extraction. However, most of them used paradigms in which only the object to identify was present in the scene. As a consequence, there have yet been no studies investigating the efficiency of prediction in the visual perception of stimuli among irrelevant information. In this study, we designed a novel priming emotional Stroop task in which participants had to identify emotional facial expressions (EFEs) presented along with a congruent or incongruent word. To further investigate the role of early extraction of LSF information in top-down prediction during emotion recognition, the target EFE was primed with the same EFE filtered in LSF or high spatial frequency (HSF). Results reveal a reduction of the Stroop interference in the LSF compared to the HSF priming condition, which supports that visual expectation, depending on early LSF information extraction, facilitates the inhibition of irrelevant information during emotion recognition.

Emotional face recognition in autism and in cerebral visual impairments: In search for specificity

“…(2006), LSF information would be projected directly to the orbitofrontal cortex, generating early activity (at 130 ms), then guiding recognition in the temporal areas (at 180 ms) in the fusiform gyrus (Bar et al ., 2006), brain regions in which activity is often found to be atypical in ASD (Critchley et al ., 2000; Kovarski et al ., 2019). These projections would be at the origin of predictions and thereby guide perceptual processes, allowing the recognition of stimuli (Beffara et al ., 2015). Several authors have suggested predictive coding abnormalities in persons with ASD as they could appear less influenced by contextual information and/or past experience (Pellicano & Burr, 2012; Sinha et al ., 2014) as their perception is less distorted and often reported as enhanced (Mottron et al ., 2006).…”

Right wing authoritarianism is associated with race bias in face detection

“…Racial biases have been robustly reported in face detection but the effects may depend on context, culture and task [5]. The dependency of racial bias upon these factors is not surprising given that high-level conceptual or social information are known to modulate low-level mechanisms of visual perception [6,7,8]. Affective valence modulates object identification during visual perception [9]but personality traits, ideologies, motivation, and social context also play a large part in face processing and categorization [10,11,12,13].…”

Differential effects of visual uncertainty and contextual guidance on perceptual decisions: Evidence from eye and mouse tracking in visual search

“…Importantly, our results describe a close interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes with which both visual uncertainty and expectations drive the accumulation of evidence during visual search. On a behavioral level, this is an extension of existing models of top-down recognition that suggest fast and automatic interactions between bottom-up and top-down visual streams (Bar, 2004;Beffara et al, 2015;Kauffmann, Chauvin, Guyader, & Peyrin, 2015). This raises important questions about bottom-up and topdown integration within and across fixations during scene exploration.…”