title: Differential impact of emotional task relevance on three indices of prioritised processing for fearful and angry facial expressions.
abstract: It is commonly assumed that threatening expressions are perceptually prioritised, possessing the ability to automatically capture and hold attention. Recent evidence suggests that this prioritisation depends on the task relevance of emotion in the case of attention holding and for fearful expressions. Using a hybrid attentional blink (AB) and repetition blindness (RB) paradigm we investigated whether task relevance also impacts on prioritisation through attention capture and perceptual salience, and if these effects generalise to angry expressions. Participants judged either the emotion (relevant condition) or gender (irrelevant condition) of two target facial stimuli (fearful, angry or neutral) imbedded in a stream of distractors. Attention holding and capturing was operationalised as modulation of AB deficits by first target (T1) and second target (T2) expression. Perceptual salience was operationalised as RB modulation. When emotion was task-relevant (Experiment 1; N = 29) fearful expressions captured and held attention, and were more perceptually salient than neutral expressions. Angry expressions captured attention, but were less perceptually salient and capable of holding attention than fearful and neutral expressions. When emotion was task-irrelevant (Experiment 2; N = 30), only fearful attention capture and perceptual salience effects remained significant. Our findings highlight the importance for threat-prioritisation research to heed both the type of threat and prioritisation investigated.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Social Neuroscience , Max Planck Institute for Human and Cognitive Brain Sciences , Leipzig , Germany.
authors.forename: Haakon G
authors.initials: HG
authors.lastname: Engen
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology/York Neuroimaging Centre , University of York , York , UK.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Smallwood
authors.affiliation: a Department of Social Neuroscience , Max Planck Institute for Human and Cognitive Brain Sciences , Leipzig , Germany.
authors.forename: Tania
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Singer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D054518:Attentional Blink; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Affective prioritisation; anger; attentional blink; fear; repetition blindness; threat