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Emotional cues differently modulate visual processing of faces and objects
Elite Mardo1, Sivan Schwartz1, Galia Avidan2
1Department of Psychology, University of Haifa.
Emotion (Washington, D.C.)
|June 8, 2018
Summary
High anxiety traits impair visual perception of cars but not faces when viewing emotional images. Attention biases perception towards salient stimuli, enhancing resilience for high-priority items like faces.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
Background:
- Emotion significantly influences visual perception.
- Anxiety traits can modulate how emotional stimuli affect perception.
- Arousal from emotional stimuli biases competition among visual inputs.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how arousal, influenced by anxiety, biases visual perception.
- To determine the role of attention in emotional modulation of visual perception.
- To examine the differential impact of emotional stimuli on processing faces versus cars.
Main Methods:
- Utilized negatively arousing pictures to assess visual discrimination.
- Employed a modified exogenous cuing task to measure attentional effects.
- Compared performance between individuals with high-trait anxiety and others.
Main Results:
- High-anxiety individuals showed impaired car discrimination after viewing negative stimuli.
- Face discrimination remained unaffected by negative stimuli in high-anxiety individuals.
- Negative cues caused processing costs for cars but not faces in anxious participants.
Conclusions:
- Arousal biases attention towards perceptually salient stimuli.
- Anxiety traits facilitate easier attentional disengagement from arousing stimuli when followed by faces.
- Attention modulates emotion's effect on perception, protecting high-priority stimuli from arousal-biased competition.
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