Neural Processing Of Emotional Words In Supraliminal And Subliminal Conditions: Analysis Of Spatiotemporal Patterns Of ERPs

AIM: Both backward masking and masked priming involve visual perception, sensory memory, attention and consciousness processes. And they have become typical paradigms used in many psychological researches. Some behavioral experimental results suggested both qualitative and quantitative differences exist between subliminal (unconscious) and supraliminal (conscious) perceptions. However, the neural mechanisms of both remain to be clarified. Recently a few researches of cognitive neuroscience science suggested the mismatch between neural information flows of bottom-up and top-down be the key to determining one stimulus being aware or not. But in most previous researches only subjective threshold was used, which is influenced by subjective confidence and response tendency.Emotion as a psychophysiological procedure contains several stages including receiving, evaluation, subjective experience and expression and its neural mechanism is also unclear. Emotional stimulus (picture or word) is usually used to elicit emotional response. The affective priming paradigm is referred as that a valenced target stimulus is responded to faster or more accurate after the presentation of an affectively related prime stimulus than after the presentation of an affectively unrelated prime stimulus. Or the evaluation of valued target trends to the valence of...