The Effect Of Different Motivations (avoidance) Intensity On Return Inhibition

Inhibition of return refers to the individual’s response to targets that appear in previously cued location, is slower than it is to the uncued location when the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) is longer than300ms. The inhibition of return is the mechanism that attention is encouraged to shift to extraneous stimulus by the organism, which, as an adaptive mechanism developed in the human evolutionary process, could avoid duplication of individual visual field search. There is no doubt that, as biological stimuli, the emotional stimuli could bring about attentional bias. Therefore, whether it could result in some impact on the inhibition of return has been an issue that the researchers kept exploring for a long time. A number of research used emotional faces as stimulus of inhibition of return has approved that the emotional information will certainly have some effect on the inhibition of return, especially some negative emotion, such as anger or fear, have a regulatory role on inhibition of return, the effect of inhibition of return would be significantly reduced. The research on it suggests that the negative emotional information have more warning meaning in terms of human survival, this kind of warning could capture attention automatically and made the inhibition removed, thus to reduce the effect of inhibition of return. However, there is no unified conclusion among such studies.In recent years, some researchers suggested that the relation between emotion and attention is not influenced by pleasure and arousal, is also influenced by motivational dimension of affect, which is the lever of approach or withdrawal motivation of affect. Researches have suggested that high approach motivated positive emotion and high withdrawal motivated negative eamotion could narrow the attentional scope while low approach motivated positive emotion and low withdrawal motivated negative emotion could broden the attentional scope; high approach motivated positive emotion reduces attentional flexibility while low withdrawal motivated negative emotion increase attentional flexibility. Researches being induced by the methods like pictures or videos, the positive emotion belongs to low approach motivated positive emotion while the negative emotion belongs to high withdrawal motivated negative emotion, which might be an explanation of the inconsistent of the research about the effect of emotion on inhibition of return. Therefore, this research conducted a more detailed classification of the motivational level of emotional stimulus, in order to investigate the in-depth and comprehensive influence on inhibition of return.This research used the cue-target paradigm to explore the effect on inhibition of return of emotions various on motivational dimensions. The experiment1used the supraliminal perceptive method of emotional stimulus, the experiment2was under the subliminal perceptive condition. The emotional stimulus of this research are selected from IAPS and Internet, they used as cues after evaluation. The results of this research show that(1)relative to the pleasant scenery pictures and object pictures, appetitive food pictures can induce high approach motivated positive emotion; relative to the pollution&disease pictures and object pictures, threatening animal pictures can induce high withdrawal motivated negative emotion.(2) Under the supraliminal perceptive conditions, relative to the low approach motivated positive emotional cues, low withdrawal motivated negative emotional cues and neutral cues, when the high approach motivated positive affect and high withdrawal motivated negative affect pictures for the cues, the effects of inhibition of return are significant reduced.(3)Under the subliminal perceptive conditions, relative to the4types emotional cues, the effects of inhibition of return would be significant only under the neutral picture cues.These results suggested that, under the supraliminal perceptive condition, the high approach motivated positive affect and high withdrawal motivated negative affect stimulus have important evolutionary significance associated with human beings to survive and multiply, while avoiding disadvantages, for the cues of inhibition of return, they would draw attention, making it difficult to transfer, and finally result in the reduction or disappearance of the effect of inhibition of return. Besides, under the subliminal perceptive condition, the motivational dimension of affect did not influence the effects of inhibition of return, the reason may be related to the arousal of emotional stimulus. This research introduced the motivational dimensional model of affect into the study of inhibition of return, extends empirical evidences with attentional scope, attentional flexibility to the inhibition mechanisms.