Biased competition for processing resources between a foreground task and emotional background pictures
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1
University of Leipzig, Germany
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2
Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany
Currently, the question whether or not emotional stimuli attract attentional processing resources involuntarily by means of their biological significance is debated in the field of Affective Neuroscience. While some studies demonstrated that emotional pictures clearly bias competition to their advantage, other studies demonstrated that there is nothing special with emotional pictures. In these later studies it was found that emotional pictures underlie the same top-down processes for resource competition as was found with non-emotional stimuli. In the present series of experiments we investigated the impact of task-irrelevant affective stimuli (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral pictures) while subjects performed an attentionally demanding foreground task. We presented flickering dots superimposed upon pictures of the International Affective picture System (IAPS) and subjects were instructed to perform a target detection task defined by these dots. Repetitive stimuli such as the flickering dots elicit the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), an ongoing sinusoidal brain response with the same frequency as the driving stimulus. The SSVEP is a powerful tool to investigate attentional resource allocation in visual cortex and allows one to investigate the temporal neuronal dynamics of cortical resource competition. In addition, SSVEP amplitude can be modulated as a function of emotional arousal, e.g. higher amplitude for arousing pictures compared to affectively neutral ones. We found - and replicated in a second study - that highly arousing background pictures (pleasant and unpleasant) induced stronger competition with the foreground task compared to neutral pictures, as reflected in reduced SSVEP amplitudes at central occipital sites. This effect extended over several hundred milliseconds and was related to behavioral responses, i.e. reduced target detection rates in the foreground task within the same time window. In a following fMRI study we manipulated difficulty of a similar foreground task (i.e. relatively easy vs. hard detection of targets) and used emotional and neutral faces as background pictures. We found motion-sensitive area V5/MT+ to be significantly attenuated in response to emotional relative to neutral face distractors. Most importantly, this effect/reduction was independent of the concurrent task demands. Likewise, the amygdala showed a significantly stronger bold signal in response to fearful relative to neutral faces. These results suggest that influences of perceptual load and emotional salience do not interact with each other in our key areas V5/MT+ and Amygdala. Rather, the processing of face distractors was mediated as an additive function of perceptual load/attention and emotional stimulus content.
Conference:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Mueller
M,
Hindi Attar
C,
Andersen
S,
Büchel
C and
Rose
M
(2008). Biased competition for processing resources between a foreground task and emotional background pictures.
Conference Abstract:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.092
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Received:
02 Dec 2008;
Published Online:
02 Dec 2008.
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Correspondence:
Matthias Mueller, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, m.mueller@rz.uni-leipzig.de