Facial affect and temporal order judgments: emotions turn back the clock

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Visual Perception
• Social Cognition

Background:

• The temporal order judgment (TOJ) paradigm is a standard method for assessing the perception of event timing.
• Facial affect, or emotion, is known to capture attention and influence cognitive processing.
• Understanding how emotions impact basic perceptual judgments like timing is crucial for a comprehensive model of human cognition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of facial affect on the perception of temporal order.
• To determine if emotional expressions on faces alter judgments of which of two stimuli appeared first.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed a temporal order judgment task using schematic faces displaying happy, neutral, or angry emotions.
• Faces were presented at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), ranging from -100 ms to 100 ms.
• Judgments of which face appeared first were recorded for each SOA and emotion condition.

Main Results:

• Facial affect significantly influenced temporal order judgments at short stimulus onset asynchronies (-17 ms, 0 ms, 17 ms).
• No significant influence of facial affect was observed at longer SOAs (-100 ms and 100 ms).
• Emotional expressions impacted judgments primarily when the task was perceptually difficult.

Conclusions:

• Emotional facial expressions modulate the perception of temporal order, particularly under conditions of temporal ambiguity.
• These findings support the hypothesis that facial affect exerts a greater influence on relative onset judgments when they are challenging.
• Facial affect plays a role in fundamental aspects of visual perception beyond simple recognition or attention.