Research On Attentional Modulation Of Face-specific Processing With Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Paradigm

A large amount of research from behavior, neuropsychology, and brain imaging haveindicated some important characteristics on facial expression and identity processing. Onthe other aspect, due to less focus on the relationship between facial processing andattention, there are still conflicting evidences between them. Most formal studies only usevisual search task to examine the effect of processing identity and expression from spacedimension, rather than time. So we use rapid serial visual presentation paradigm toevaluate the effect of attention on facial processing from time dimension. We designedbehavior and event related potential experiments to reveal the relationship.The results of this study were:(1) faces, as a kind of special stimulation, are more easier to be identified by testers inRSVP tasks. Simultaneously, it induced larger P1, VPP, N170,P3components and shorterlatency of N1than normal non-face pictures.(2) In RSVP tasks, the attention blink revealed during both face and non face pictures,which indicate the facial processing is the same with dealing with other complicated typeof stimulation that attention resource is necessary.(3) Compare with non-face pictures, face pictures have heavier influence on P1andN1components, which showed that facial processing is different from processing of othertype of stimulation at the very beginning of selection stages.(4) P3component is influenced by attention resource. The more difficult the task, thesmaller P3amplitudes. One conclusion from our tests is that dual task with long timeinterval elicited smaller P3amplitudes than single task with short time interval.(5) In the processing of facial identity, N170and VPP components are quite sensitiveto the attention resource variation. The latency and amplitudes of N170and VPP can alsobe influenced by time interval, meanwhile, N170amplitudes is affected by task type. In thecase that attention resources is sufficient, VPP and N170have a larger amplitudes andshorter latency. These lead to a conclusion that attention resource have a important impact on facial processing and lacking of attention resources will make coding for facial structureharder.