title: Unintentionality of affective attention across visual processing stages.
abstract: Affective attention involves bottom-up perceptual selection that prioritizes motivationally significant stimuli. To clarify the extent to which this process is automatic, we investigated the dependence of affective attention on the intention to process emotional meaning. Affective attention was manipulated by presenting affective images with variable arousal and intentionality by requiring participants to make affective and non-affective evaluations. Polytomous rather than binary decisions were required from the participants in order to elicit relatively deep emotional processing. The temporal dynamics of prioritized processing were assessed using early posterior negativity (EPN, 175-300 ms) as well as P3-like (P3, 300-500 ms) and slow wave (SW, 500-1500 ms) portions of the late positive potential. All analyzed components were differentially sensitive to stimulus categories suggesting that they indeed reflect distinct stages of motivational significance encoding. The intention to perceive emotional meaning had no effect on EPN, an additive effect on P3, and an interactive effect on SW. We concluded that affective attention went from completely unintentional during the EPN to partially unintentional during P3 and SW where top-down signals, respectively, complemented and modulated bottom-up differences in stimulus prioritization. The findings were interpreted in light of two-stage models of visual perception by associating the EPN with large-capacity initial relevance detection and the P3 as well as SW with capacity-limited consolidation and elaboration of affective stimuli.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Andero
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Uusberg
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Helen
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Uibo
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Kairi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kreegipuu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tamm
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Aire
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Raidvee
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu Tartu, Estonia ; Estonian Academy of Sciences Tallinn, Estonia.
authors.forename: Jüri
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Allik
keywords: EPN; IAPS; LPP; automatic affective attention; unintentionality