Auditory And Cross-modal Attentional Bias Of Positive Environmental Sounds

Many studies have shown that people’s attention is easily attracted by negative stimuli compare to neutral stimuli,which is called negative attentional bias.In recent years,more and more researchers have extended their study of attentional bias to positive stimuli.Attention bias can be divided into two components: initial orienting and disengagement difficulty.Initial orienting is an early selection mechanism driven by stimuli.It refers to that individuals can quickly notice emotional stimuli,and disengagement difficulty usually occurs in the late stage of attention,which means that individuals are more difficult to transfer attention from emotional stimuli.The results of meta-analysis showed that normal individuals also had attentional bias to positive visual stimuli,and its component is more likely to be initial orienting.In the past decade,researchers have extended the study of negative attentional bias to auditory modal and cross-modal research,but they have not explored the attentional bias of positive auditory stimuli alone.The purpose of this study is to explore the positive attentional bias and its components in normal individuals.In Experiment 1,we used the modified auditory spatial cueing paradigm by block and within-subjects design.The positive and neutral environment sound were used as the detection stimulus,and the short high-frequency and low-frequency pure sound were the target stimulus and interference stimulus respectively.The location of the target stimulus or interference stimulus may appear on the same side or the opposite side of the detection stimulus,which are called valid and invalid group respectively.In the experiment,the subjects were required to respond to the position of high-frequency pure tone quickly and accurately,we record the reaction time of the subjects.The score of attentional bias is calculated by reaction time of invalid group minus valid group.The more positive the score,the greater the degree of attentional bias.The results showed that the attention bias score of positive group was significantly higher than that of neutral group,and the response time of positive valid group was significantly faster than that of neutral valid group.In addition,the effect of inhibition of return was found in neutral sound group.In order to eliminate the influence of arousal,the skin conductance data of subjects were recorded when they completed the task.The results showed that there was no significant difference between the neutral sound block and the positive sound block.In order to explore whether there is cross-modal effect in attentional bias of positive voice,the modified auditory-visual spatial cueing paradigm was used in Experiment 2.The auditory stimulus materials and experimental design were the same as experiment 1.The target stimulus and interference stimulus were the triangle with the vertex upward and the vertex downward respectively.Subjects were required to respond to the triangle with the vertex upward as quickly and accurately as possible,and not respond to the triangle with the vertex downward.The response time of the subjects was recorded.The same as in Experiment 1,the attention bias score of positive group was significantly higher than that of neutral group,and the response time of positive valid group was significantly faster than that of neutral valid group.In Experiment 2,the effect of inhibition of return was not found.As in Experiment 1,there was no significant difference between positive sound block and neutral sound block in skin conductance,excluding the effect of arousal.To explore the brain mechanism of attentional bias in positive voice,ERP technology was used to verify the attentional bias of positive auditory stimuli in Experiment 3.The experimental process was basically the same as that of Experiment 2.In order to improve the validity of the experiment,some voices were changed.We found that the response time of positive valid group was faster than that of neutral valid group.ERP results showed that there were differences in N1 components between positive and neutral stimuli,specifically,N1 components of positive group were more negative than neutral group.In addition,the amplitude of N400 after the positive sound was significantly greater than that of the neutral sound.The amplitude of P300 in positive valid group is greater than that in the neutral valid group time-locked to visual target.To sum up,this study draws the following conclusions:1.Normal individuals have positive attentional bias in auditory modal;2.Positive auditory stimuli can accelerate attention to neutral visual stimuli,positive attention bias exists cross-modal effect;3.The attentional bias of positive auditory stimuli occurs in the early stage,and the component of positive attentional bias is engagement.