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Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control
Published on: July 5, 2015
Neural modulation of emotional-word processing during the attentional blink under varying T1 task demands: An ERP
Xintong Liu1, Chunping Yan2, Wenbo Luo3
1Institute of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, 116029, China; Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Province, Dalian, 116029, China; School of Psychology, Henan Medical University, Xinxiang, 453003, China.
Abstract:
Previous studies have found that emotional words as a second visual target (T2) are detected more accurately than neutral T2 in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task, a phenomenon known as the antagonistic effect of the Attentional Blink (AB). However, it remains unclear whether the antagonistic effect of AB for emotional words is modulated by T1 task difficulty. In this study, we examined whether T1 difficulty moderates the AB effect for T2 (emotional words: negative, positive, and neutral) in RSVP using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants were instructed to perform a letter search task for T1 and an emotional classification task for T2. Behavioral results showed that the antagonistic effect of AB for emotional words as T2 was not moderated by T1 difficulty. However, ERP results revealed that negative words elicited larger P3a and P3b amplitudes compared with neutral words, and positive words elicited larger P3b amplitudes over neutral words when T1 difficulty was low, whereas no significant differences were observed among the three emotional word types when T1 difficulty was high. Overall, we conclude that attentional resources constrain the neural expression of the antagonistic effect of the attentional blink for emotional words.
