Emotional modulation of the attentional blink is awareness-dependent

It is well known that emotion can modulate attentional processes. Previous studies have shown that even under restricted awareness, emotional facial expressions (especially threat-related) can guide the direction of spatial attention. However, it remains unclear whether emotional facial expressions...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2012-09, Vol.7 (9), p.e46394-e46394
Main Authors: Qian, Wenli, Meng, Qianli, Chen, Lin, Zhou, Ke
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Attention (Psychology)
Attentional Blink - physiology
Awareness - physiology
Biophysics
Brain research
Emotions
Emotions - physiology
Experiments
Explicit knowledge
Facial Expression
Fear - physiology
Fear - psychology
Female
Humans
Laboratories
Male
Medicine
Neurosciences
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Physiological aspects
Psychological aspects
Rapid serial visual presentation
Reaction Time
Science
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Studies
Young Adult
Zoology
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Summary:It is well known that emotion can modulate attentional processes. Previous studies have shown that even under restricted awareness, emotional facial expressions (especially threat-related) can guide the direction of spatial attention. However, it remains unclear whether emotional facial expressions under restricted awareness can affect temporal attention. To address this issue, we used a modified attentional blink (AB) paradigm in which masked (Experiment 1) or unmasked (Experiment 2) emotional faces (fearful or neutral) were presented before the AB sequence. We found that, in comparison with neutral faces, masked fearful faces significantly decreased the AB magnitude (Experiment 1), whereas unmasked fearful faces significantly increased the AB magnitude (Experiment 2). These results indicate that effects of emotional expression on the AB are modulated by the level of awareness.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0046394