Familiarity with unpleasant stimuli has no influence on top-down regulation of the competition for processing resources in early visual areas
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1
Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Germany
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2
Department of Neurosciences, University of California San Diego, United States
We examined to what extent familiarity and experience with certain emotional stimuli modulates top-down guidance of attention to these stimuli. To this end we presented flickering dots superimposed upon neutral and unpleasant pictures from the International Affective Picture Set (IAPS) and from the Emotional Picture Set (EmoPicS). The flickering dots elicited a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP). Subjects were instructed to attend the dots in order to detect coherent motion targets while ignoring the background pictures. To control for familiarity we tested paramedics and a non-paramedics control group and included unpleasant images with a medical (for example mutilations) and a non-medical content (e.g. threat). After EEG recordings, participants rated valence, arousal and familiarity of each picture. Paramedics rated medical content pictures as more familiar and less unpleasant compared to the control group. However, these subjective ratings of the pictures had no influence on the SSVEP: paramedics showed an identical time course of SSVEP amplitudes as the control group. In fact, both groups showed distraction effects to task-irrelevant background pictures regardless of familiarity. In conclusion, familiarity has no influence on top-down regulation of attentional resource competition in early visual areas. Funding: Research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, graduate program 'Function of Attention in Cognition'.
Keywords:
emotion,
SSVEP
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Emotion, Motivation and the Social Brain
Citation:
Schönwald
LI,
Andersen
SK and
Müller
MM
(2011). Familiarity with unpleasant stimuli has no influence on top-down regulation of the competition for processing resources in early visual areas.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00164
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Received:
18 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
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Correspondence:
Dr. Liane I Schönwald, Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, liane.schoenwald@uni-leipzig.de