Study On Attention Dependency Of Emotional Perception And Its Neural Mechanism

Emotion is complex psychological and physiological phenomenon, which plays a crucial role in perception, memory, reasoning, decision-making and execution control, and it has always been the hot issue of the cognitive neuroscience research. Lots of literatures have used eye tracking, ERP, MEG and fMRI to study the relationship between emotion and attention. However, their conclusions had a big difference. Several researchers believe that the processing of emotional stimuli was automatic and independent of attention, and it could even be perceived when observers were unaware of the stimuli. However many other studies found that subjects could not process emotional stimuli without attention and awareness, they suggested that affective processing was under the control of attention in many circumstances.In our experiments, an eye tracking technology and a dual-task experimental paradigm was adopted to investigate this controversy by manipulating the attention of subjects during the processing of emotion-laden visual items. We studied whether subjects could detect the emotional faces which presented outside the focus of attention. At the same time, we also investigated whether emotional information could be parallel processed with other stimuli simultaneously.Our results revealed that the cognition of emotion was under the control of attentional resource, but due to emotional stimuli had higher cognitive priority, its processing required very little attention. Participants could not distinguish the peripheral emotional stimuli when the central task and peripheral task were both emotion discrimination, showed that emotion recognition maybe controlled by attentional resource. By comparison, when the central task and peripheral task were different and emotional stimuli were still presented peripherally, participants were able to process emotional information well. This result revealed that emotional information could be parallel processed with other stimuli synchronously, and there may be a specific channel to specifically process emotional information in the brain.