title: Attention modulations on the perception of social hierarchy at distinct temporal stages: an electrophysiological investigation.
abstract: Recent behavioral and neuroscientific studies have revealed the preferential processing of superior-hierarchy cues. However, it remains poorly understood whether top-down controlled mechanisms modulate temporal dynamics of neurocognitive substrates underlying the preferential processing of these biologically and socially relevant cues. This was investigated in the current study by recording event-related potentials from participants who were presented with superior or inferior social hierarchy. Participants performed a hierarchy-judgment task that required attention to hierarchy cues or a gender-judgment task that withdrew their attention from these cues. Superior-hierarchy cues evoked stronger neural responses than inferior-hierarchy cues at both early (N170/N200) and late (late positive potential, LPP) temporal stages. Notably, the modulations of top-down attention were identified on the LPP component, such that superior-hierarchy cues evoked larger LPP amplitudes than inferior-hierarchy cues only in the attended condition; whereas the modulations of the N170/N200 component by hierarchy cues were evident in both attended and unattended conditions. These findings suggest that the preferential perception of superior-hierarchy cues involves both relatively automatic attentional bias at the early temporal stage as well as flexible and voluntary cognitive evaluation at the late temporal stage. Finally, these hierarchy-related effects were absent when participants were shown the same stimuli which, however, were not associated with social-hierarchy information in a non-hierarchy task (Experiment 2), suggesting that effects of social hierarchy at early and late temporal stages could not be accounted for by differences in physical attributes between these social cues.
authors: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors: Chunliang
authors: C
authors: Feng
authors: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors: Tengxiang
authors: T
authors: Tian
authors: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors: Xue
authors: X
authors: Feng
authors: National Key Lab of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China; Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China; Research Center of Sport Psychology, Wuhan Sports University, Wuhan, China. Electronic address: luoyj@szu.edu.cn.
authors: Yue-Jia
authors: YJ
authors: Luo
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006608:Hierarchy, Social; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Event-related potential (ERP); LPP; N170/N200; Social hierarchy