| Since there are usually much more stimuli in the scene than limited capacity visual system can process at any moment, the ability to quickly and efficiently detect and analyze is highly valuable for one's accommodate environment and development. The salient features of the stimulus in the visual scene, the individual's subjective intentions or mission objectives are likely to be the factors that affect visual selective attention. Rapid detection of information with the meaning of existence in the environment, such as emotional information is an important manifestation of the individual's adaptive behavior. This selection process can be controlled either by bottom-up factors, such as salient stimuli in the visual scene, or by top-down factors, such as subjective intention or task target. The ability to quickly and efficiently detect emotional stimuli, such as fearful faces, is vital for one's survival. The early researches and theories on emotional processing tend to separate the emotion and cognition, suggesting that they can each be independently observed and explained. With the development of emotional neuroscience research, scientists have found that emotion cannot be regarded as independent of the other more "cognitive" abilities, and vice versa. A lot of researches on the emotional processing believed that emotional information processing is automated, especially the processing of negative emotional stimuli containing dangerous information. One core feature of automaticity is the independence of processing emotion from factors that can affect attention such as cognitive load. Another view raised that emotional information was controlled during the attentional processing, and it was affected by the top-down processing. Both these two different views have their own experimental evidence.Target in the visual search paradigm is the same in different series, because changes in visual stimuli are not caused by only one target in the distance and level of processing within the trials. Theoretically speaking, the target of the paradigm cannot be known as the changing target. In contrast, the Attentional Blink, is the paradigm the researchers studied the time course of attention in different time series of the same spatial location, which is a moving target processing. This is very similar to the human's selection of a number of targets at the same time in the real life. Thus, the purpose of this study is adopting attentional blink paradigm to investigate whether a task-irrelevant emotional face can capture attention beyond top-down control and how this attentional capture is modulated by attentional resources.In Experiment1, there aer two task.In one, participants to explicitly judge the facial expression of T2stimuli, thus, the face pictures were task relevant, and attention was directed to their emotional expression. In another, participants had to judge the person in T2's gender, hence, the face pictures were task relevant, but attention was not explicitly directed to their emotional expression. In Experiment2, focused attention (i.e., when the participants fist finished one more difficult cognition task) was induced using a load task.Base on these results of three experiments and relative discussions, it can conclude that:First, compared with the processing of direct identification of emotional information, the effect of emotional information processing was reduced. Namely, the processing of emotional information was affected by the top-down attentional control;Second, the processing of emotional information was affected by the attentional resources. In other words, under the low load conditions, the attentional capture effect of emotional information was significant; but under the high load conditions, the processing of the emotional information was subject to the regulation of the attentional resources, thus, the priority effect disappeared.Third, the processing of emotionally negative stimuli is not a completely automated process. |
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