Testing stimulus exposure time as the critical factor of increased EPN and LPP amplitudes for fearful faces during perceptual distraction tasks

Vormbrock, Ria; Bruchmann, Maximilian; Menne, Lucas; Straube, Thomas; Schindler, Sebastian

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2022.12.011

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…We suspect that the repetitive presentation of hundreds of highly standardized face stimuli (with no external features, shown at an identical screen location) explains this repetitive oculomotor behavior seen in EEG experiments on face recognition. Our finding that the size and direction of (micro)saccades was overall highly similar between emotion conditions should be reassuring for face researchers who are concerned about confounds from differences in gaze behavior between conditions (e.g., Vormbrock et al, 2023).…”

Section: Stereotypical Saccades Within the Face Were Found In Nearly ...mentioning

confidence: 57%

(Micro)saccade-related potentials during face recognition: A study combining EEG, eye-tracking, and deconvolution modeling

Spiering,

Dimigen

2024

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Under natural viewing conditions, complex stimuli such as human faces are typically looked at several times in succession, implying that their recognition may unfold across multiple eye fixations. Although electrophysiological (EEG) experiments on face recognition typically prohibit eye movements, participants still execute frequent (micro)saccades on the face, each of which generates its own visuocortical response. This finding raises the question of whether the fixation-related potentials (FRPs) evoked by these tiny gaze shifts also contain psychologically valuable information about face processing. Here, we investigated this question by corecording EEG and eye movements in an experiment with emotional faces (happy, angry, neutral). Deconvolution modeling was used to separate the stimulus ERPs to face onset from the FRPs generated by subsequent microsaccades-induced refixations on the face. As expected, stimulus ERPs exhibited typical emotion effects, with a larger early posterior negativity (EPN) for happy/angry compared with neutral faces. Eye tracking confirmed that participants made small saccades in 98% of the trials, which were often aimed at the left eye of the stimulus face. However, while each saccade produced a strong response over visual areas, this response was unaffected by the face’s emotional expression, both for the first and for subsequent (micro)saccades. This finding suggests that the face’s affective content is rapidly evaluated after stimulus onset, leading to only a short-lived sensory enhancement by arousing stimuli that does not repeat itself during immediate refixations. Methodologically, our work demonstrates how eye tracking and deconvolution modeling can be used to extract several brain responses from each EEG trial, providing insights into neural processing at different latencies after stimulus onset.

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Section: Stereotypical Saccades Within the Face Were Found In Nearly ...mentioning

confidence: 57%

(Micro)saccade-related potentials during face recognition: A study combining EEG, eye-tracking, and deconvolution modeling

Spiering,

Dimigen

2024

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…Longer durations might also enable participants to decode the emotional information. Brief stimulus durations are necessary to ensure the relevant task focus and avoid additional cognitive processes 51 , 52 , 54 . In contrast to the perceptual task, when participants attended to the word meaning or were explicitly asked to evaluate the emotional meaning of the words, larger EPN amplitudes were observed for negative compared to neutral stimuli.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, the brief presentation durations ensured that the participants' attention was only directed at a specific task, showing successful modulations of emotional effects across tasks, similar to previous studies. Nevertheless, future studies might use tasks with varying presentation durations to test whether effects differ with longer presentation times 54 . Finally, we used the collapsed conditions or collapsed differences to identify ERP components of interest.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, this kind of task allows the separation of more automatic (early) processing stages from subsequent mid-latency and late stages, which require sufficient attentional resources or task relevance during the processing of emotional stimuli. Importantly, the dissociation between ERP components requires brief presentation times to avoid attentional spillover to task-irrelevant stimulus features 54 . It remains an open question whether a similar dissociation of processing stages can also be revealed while processing negative vs. neutral words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dissociating different temporal stages of emotional word processing by feature-based attention

Schindler,

Vormbrock,

Helming

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

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Negative emotional content is prioritized across different stages of information processing as reflected by different components of the event-related potential (ERP). In this preregistered study (N = 40), we investigated how varying the attentional focus allows us to dissociate the involvement of specific ERP components in the processing of negative and neutral words. Participants had to discriminate the orientation of lines overlaid onto the words, the word type (adjective/noun), or the emotional content (negative/neutral). Thus, attention was either not focused on words (distraction task), non-emotional aspects, or the emotional relevance of words. Regardless of the task, there were no significant differences between negative and neutral words for the P1, N1, or P2 components. In contrast, interactions between emotion and task were observed for the early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). EPN differences were absent during the distraction task but were present in the other two tasks. LPP emotion differences were found only when attention was directed to the emotional content of words. Our study adds to the evidence that early ERP components do not reliably separate negative and neutral words. However, results show that mid-latency and late stages of emotion processing are separable by different attention tasks. The EPN represents a stage of attentional enhancement of negative words given sufficient attentional resources. Differential activations during the LPP stage are associated with more elaborative processing of the emotional meaning of words.

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“…Furthermore, we would like to note that the dissociation between ERP components requires brief presentation times to avoid attentional spillover to task-irrelevant stimulus features. Thus, findings may differ with longer presentation times (see Vormbrock et al, 2023).…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dissociating different temporal stages of emotional word processing by feature- based attention

Schindler,

Vormbrock,

Helming

et al. 2023

Preprint

Self Cite

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Negative emotional content is prioritized across different stages of information processing as reflected by different components of the event-related potential (ERPs). In this preregistered study (N = 40), we investigated how varying the attentional focus allows us to dissociate the involvement of specific ERP components in the processing of negative and neutral words. Participants had to discriminate the orientation of lines overlaid onto the words, the word type (adjective/noun), or the emotional content (negative/neutral). Thus, attention was either not focused on words (distraction task), non-emotional aspects, or the emotional relevance of words. Regardless of the task, there were no significant differences between negative and neutral words for the P1, N1, or P2 components. In contrast, interactions between emotion and task were observed for the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) and Late Positive Potential (LPP). EPN differences were absent during the distraction task but were present in the other two tasks. LPP emotion differences were found only when attention was directed to the emotional content of words. Our study adds to the evidence that early ERP components do not reliably separate negative and neutral words. However, results show that mid-latency and late stages of emotion processing are separable by different attention tasks. The EPN represents a stage of attentional enhancement of negative words given sufficient attentional resources. Differential activations during the LPP stage are associated with more elaborative processing of emotional meaning of words.

show abstract

Testing stimulus exposure time as the critical factor of increased EPN and LPP amplitudes for fearful faces during perceptual distraction tasks

Cited by 5 publications

References 70 publications

(Micro)saccade-related potentials during face recognition: A study combining EEG, eye-tracking, and deconvolution modeling

(Micro)saccade-related potentials during face recognition: A study combining EEG, eye-tracking, and deconvolution modeling

Dissociating different temporal stages of emotional word processing by feature-based attention

Dissociating different temporal stages of emotional word processing by feature- based attention

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