The Influence Of Facial Expression In Attentional Orienting

Changeable aspects of faces, such as gaze shifts and facial expressions, provide humans with powerful social signals that permit inferences about the internal states and intentions of others. That's because gaze direction and emotional expression are often used conjointly to direct visual-spatial attention to objects in the environment and inform others about the gazer's feelings towards those objects. Understanding how changes in facial expression and gaze direction are used in social situations is important for an observer to respond appropriately to the gazer.The current study builds upon prior research by examining the impact of concurrent changes in cue and target emotion and their interactions with gaze shifts during attentional orienting. There are three experiments in this research. Neutral faces and target words are used in the first experiment. The goal is to confirm gaze cuing effect. In the second experiment cues consist of fearful and happy faces to investigate the difference for emotional effect among three expression faces. Based on the result of the second experiment, the cues and targets are both emotional in the third experiment. The objective is to check in short stimulus onset asynchrony whether emotional targets are helpful for emotional effect.The results suggest gaze and emotional expression may be processed in separate streams at first. Facial expression takes precedence over gaze direction with respect its early effect. What's more, the interaction between facial cues and targets are occurred when targets are emotional.In general, there are several conclusions:In behavioral data :(1)There is gaze cuing effect in both SOA when facial cues are neutral. But the difference of effect amount isn't significant.(2)There is gaze cuing effect in happy and fearful expression whether the target is neutral or emotional.(3) When the target is neutral, the difference of effect amount is only in long SOA when cues are fearful and neutral as well as fearful and happy. But happy face isn't significantly different from neutral one. It suggests facial expression and gaze direction interact after some time. (4)The main effect of emotion appears in long SOA. The discrimination to targets after fearful face is faster than that after other two emotional faces.(5)When target's emotional valence is same with that in prior faces,the discrimination is more quickly.In ERP data:(1)The main effect of emotion appears in P1 triggered by expression cues.(2)P1 and N1 triggered by targets show gaze cuing effect and the interaction between gaze and expression.(3)The latency and amplitude of ERP component supplement behavioral data. Emotion effect appears in early processing. Results illustrate how individuals process attentional orienting in different emotional faces when they can't predict the outcome of environment.