Fleeting images: a new look at early emotion discrimination.
The visual brain quickly sorted stimuli for emotional impact despite high-speed presentation (3 or 5 per s) in a sustained, serial torrent of 700 complex pictures. Event-related potentials, recorded with a dense electrode array, showed selective discrimination of emotionally arousing stimuli from less affective content. Primary sources of this activation were over the occipital cortices, extending to right parietal cortex, suggesting a processing focus in the posterior visual system. Emotion discrimination was independent of formal pictorial properties (color, brightness. spatial frequency, and complexity). The data support the hypothesis of a very short-term conceptual memory store (M. C. Potter, 1999)-shown here to include a fleeting but reliable assessment of affective meaning.
Junghöfer
M
M
Health Sciences Center, University of Florida, Gainesville 32610-0165, USA. junghofe@ufl.edu
Bradley
M M
MM
Elbert
T R
TR
Lang
P J
PJ
D000328:Adult; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D013997:Time Factors; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology