Spatial Attention Captured By Emotional Faces

Whether emotional stimuli,such as emotional faces,can induce spatial attention has been an issue of great concern to researchers,but there is still a lot of arguments.Previous studies used single cues and two spatial positions,so it is likely that robust spatial cueing effect masked the dominant effect of emotional stimuli.In other words,inappropriate baseline settings in previous studies may mask spatial attention effects induced by emotional stimuli.In the current study,multi-space matching cues,placing emotional faces around multiple matching neutral faces,were used to highlight the emotional effect.In addition,we used Monte Carlo method in experiment 1 to compare Growth curve analysis(GCA)method to improve the statistical power of traditional EEG analysis methods,so as to improve the possible emotional evoked attention effect.Experiment 2A and 2B adopted the same experimental paradigm,while the probability of cueing condition in experiment 2A was artificially increased which lead to a facilitation effect on the cueing location with high probability.So we changed the cueing condition to completely random and added Event-related Potentials(ERPs)technology in experiment 2B,so the influence of emotion face to cueing and non-cueing at different distances were investigated respectively.Although there was no significant spatial attention captured by emotional stimuli in behavior index,it was found in ERPs index that emotional stimuli had a significant modulation of P1,N1 components induced by subsequent target.These results suggest that the lack of observation of stable attention effect evoked by emotional faces may be due to the task paradigm and insensitivity of measurement index.The results also showed that emotional faces can indeed capture spatial attention,although the effect is weak and requires more sensitive measurements and appropriate baseline conditions to highlight.