Visuomotor integration of relevant and irrelevant angry and fearful facial expressions

Abstract

Our brain codes the features of perceptual events in a distributed fashion, raising the question of how information belonging to one event is processed without any interference of features from other events. Hommel (1998) suggested the "event file" concept to elucidate these mechanisms: an episodic memory trace "binding" together perceptual features and actions related to an object. Using a similar paradigm, we designed a pilot experiment and four additional experiments to investigate whether emotion, similarly than perceptual features, could bind with a motor response when the emotion was relevant and irrelevant for the task. Few studies have revealed this to be the case. We investigated how angry and fearful faces expressed by avatars and humans might be subject to a binding phenomenon. Our results show that at least three degrees of visuomotor binding seem to coexist: one implicating the relevant feature of the task with a strong effect on behavior, another implicating the location with a smaller behavioral effect (even if not task related), and a third implicating non-task-related features with behavioral effects only under specific conditions in which emotion could play a role. Our adaptation of Hommel's paradigm showed that emotional percepts can be subject to visuomotor binding effects even if the emotion is not task related confirming the important role of emotional information for the central nervous system. These findings offer new perspective in the investigation of the emotion-action binding at the neuronal level.

Audiomotor integration of angry and happy prosodies

“…Participants would be faster for a complete repetition of the features and the motor response than for a partial repetition of them. However, as our previous results showed concerning the emotion-action binding (Coll & Grandjean, 2016) and following the intentional weighting principle (Hommel et al, 2014;Memelink & Hommel, 2013), this interaction would depend on the taskrelevant feature. It would always be observed when emotion is task relevant and only in the loudness task when irrelevant.…”

“…However, a major difference with the way emotion was tested in the event file literature might influence the present study: static pictures were always displayed to the participants (e.g., Coll & Grandjean, 2016;Colzato et al, 2007;Lavender & Hommel, 2007). Whereas participants were faced with prototypical emotional facial expressions quasi-instantly recognizable in our previous study (Coll & Grandjean, 2016), emotional prosodies require more time to be processed. Therefore, we might expect differences in the emotion-action binding of prosodies due to their specific temporal dynamics.…”

“…Sample sizes were decided based on a power analysis realized on a previous behavioral experiment (Experiment 1; Coll & Grandjean, 2016) with the "simr" package on R (Green & Macleod, 2016), in which 100% of power [95% confidence interval (CI) (99.63, 100)] for an effect size of R 2 m = 0.03 1 and R 2 c = 0.34 was obtained with 20 participants. All reported having normal or corrected-to-normal vision and were not familiar with the purpose of the experiments.…”

“…Hommel (1998) suggested the event file concept: an episodic memory trace binding perceptual and motor information pertaining to an object. By adapting Hommel's paradigm to emotional faces in a previous study (Coll & Grandjean, 2016), we demonstrated that emotion could take part in an event file with motor responses. We also postulate such binding to occur with emotional prosodies, due to an equal importance of automatic reactions to such events.…”

“…Postulating that the emotion-action binding could play a major role in the development of anxiety disorders, such as phobia or post-traumatic stress disorders: A stimulus previously associated with a traumatic event reactivating an intense fear, we developed five studies by replacing Hommel's geometric figures (1998) with emotional facial expressions (Coll & Grandjean, 2016). Instead of the overtrained approach-avoidance responses to emotions (see Phaf, Mohr, Rotteveel, & Wicherts, 2014), the usual right and left responses of Hommel (1998) were kept to study the foundations of the emotion-action binding.…”