The Impact Of Emotional Information On The Distribution Of Attentional Discrete Sampling

Recent evidence revealed the discrete nature of attentional sampling.In neuroelectrophysiology,studies have shown that neural oscillations in the Alpha band(7 to 14 Hz)in the brain can be used as a neural mechanism for discrete processing of attention.In behavioral research,researchers used a high time-resolved psychophysical measurement in clue-target paradigm to investigate the dynamics of attentional sampling along the time course,which is called behavioral oscillations.The phenomenon of behavioral oscillation reveals that attention can evenly alternate between the cued position and the uncued position,and the sampling frequency is in Alpha band.Although attentional sampling is influenced by several factors,such as the difficulty of the task,the type of stimulus being sampled,etc.,no studies have shown that emotion can also affect attentional sampling.Emotional stimuli have a wide range of effects on attention.For example,in the traditional clue-target paradigm,if the cue is valid,then the detection of target after a negative emotional cue will be faster than the neutral one,which indicates that the emotional information has a stronger capture effect on attention.If the cue is invalid,then the target's detection after a negative emotional cue will be slower than the neutral cue,indicating that attention has difficulty relieving the emotional position.In this work,we utilized cue-to-target paradigm with high temporal resolution to investigate the sampling differences between cued location and uncued location under neutral and negative emotion conditions,respectively.The result showed that under the four experimental conditions,the sampling frequency of attention is 7~11Hz,which is consistent with the results revealed by electrophysiological studies.In addition,the results of the peak test show that the main effect of emotional valence and cue validity is not significant,the interaction effect is significant.So it suggested that emotions have an effect on the sampling pattern of attention.