The Effect Of Affective Priming On Endogenous And Exogenous Attention

The influence of emotional condition on cognition has attracted many researchers' attention. At present, researches about the influence of emotion on attention mostly concentrate on the interferential effect of emotional information on attention. Most studies find that the negatively emotional information can attract people's deviation of attention. But there isn't so much research that to study the effect of emotional condition on attentional process. And so is the research field of visually spatial selective attention. Endogenous and exogenous attention are two different kinds of visually spatial selective attention, if there is difference for effect of emotional condition on them? And what effect on them for different kind of emotional condition? According to these questions, this research studied the effect of positively and negatively emotional condition on endogenous and exogenous attention. Getting across in-depth analysis, we found that both positively and negatively emotional condition can affect exogenous attention obviously, and the effect was different between two different kind of emotional condition. But endogenous attention didn't show that was affected by the condition of affective priming.This research consists of four experiments. Considering that meanings of affective priming and the working time of endogenous and exogenous attention, we distinguish two different kind of detecting stimulator. One kind is no meaning squareness, the other is emotional word. And we compared the results that effect of emotional condition on two different attention. In experiment 1 and 2, we studied the effect of positive and negative emotion on endogenous and exogenous attention when the target was squareness which had no real meaning. In experiment 3 and 4, the targets were emotional word. We also studied the emotional influence on endogenous and exogenous attention. After analyzing, we obtained the following conclusions:1.In the early stage of visually selective attention, especially for exogenous attention, the lower visual field is preponderant visual field compared with the upper visual field . The cuing that appeared in the lower visual field can facilitate attention shifting and selectiving more easily. While in the late stage of visually selective attention, the upper visual field changes for preponderant field, the targets that appear in the upper visual field can be scaned firstly compared with that appear in the lower visual field. These results show that the priority of upper and lower visual field may relate with different process stage of selective attention.2.Under the present design of SOA(from 500 to 600ms) and validity proportion of 80% that according to the results of prevenient researches, our study find that the effect of endogenous cue isn't obvious. Whereas the effect of exogenous cue was obvious when SOA was less than 300ms and validity proportion was 80%. This result indicate that the effect of endogenous cue may become weak when SOA was between 500 and 600ms, or the effect of endogenous cue is disturbed by the character of target.3.Under endogenous and exogenous attentional condition, we don't find that the positively and negatively emotional information relate with the upper and lower orientation obviously, and we also don't find that the information and orientation can influence each other. This result may indicate that even if the positive and negative emotional information correlate with the upper and lower orientation, the relationship might be weak. Under complex experimental task condition, the relationship might be disturbed.4.When the target was no meaning squareness, the effect of positive and negative emotional condition for detecting of target isn't evident. When the target was emotional word, participants' response is faster under negative than positive emotional condition, but the consistency effect doesn't appear. This result illuminate that the affective priming mainly represent the effect of previous emotional condition on the subsequent emotional information. And when the time of affective priming is short-lived, the negative emotion may facilitate the processing of attention but not restrain the processing.5.The processing of exogenous attention is obviously affected by affective priming. And maily exhibit that firstly, when exogenous cues appear in the lower visual field, the effect of cue validity disappear for the effect of emotion. Secondly, when the target is emotional word, there is effect which different from affective priming between emotional condition and emotionally targeting word. This result indicates that exogenous attention can be influenced by emotion more easily. But the endogenous processing doesn't show that obviously affected by eomional condition under the present design.