The Effect Of Affective Priming On Exogenous Attention In Learning Disabilities

The experimental paradigm is cue-target paradigm; The participants are selected randomly from learning disabilities(LDs). The affective priming materials are those short films which can prime LDs` affect directly. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effect of affective priming on exogenous attention in learning disabilities (LDs), in which, the target is geometric figure or lexical emotions.There are three experiments and 186 LDs took part in this study. The Experiment 1 is preparatory experiment and its purpose is to find which short films can prime LDs` affects and to select 100 lexical emotions for experiment 3. Experiment 2 is exogenous attention shifting task, in which the target is geometric figure. Experiment 3 is also exogenous attention task, but in which the targets are lexical emotions. The procedure of Experiment 2 and 3 is: the participant self-assess his current affect, then watches the priming film, after that he should self-assess his affect again, next, he will finish the exogenous attention shifting task. After analyzing, we can conclude as follows:1. At 100ms SOA, participants respond to valid trails are faster than to invalid trails, but at 500ms SOA, the phenomenon is reverses. The phenomenon referred to as"inhibition of return".2. The negative affect obviously decreases LDs` exogenous attention, and weaken their cognitive flexibility.3. There are some correlation between positive affect and attentive benefit. The LD is at higher positive affect, he will take much advantage on the cue, which shows more obvious validity effect.4. There are some correlation between negative affect and attentive cost. The LD is at higher negative affect, he will lose much reaction time on attentive cost. The negative affect is associated with slower disengage attention. 5. The LDs in different affect show attention bias to corresponding lexical emotion. This phenomenon can be explained by mood-congruent.