Emotional Congruency Modulates Audiovisual Spread Of Attention

Spread of attention is a process that the selective attention towards the visual feature of an object will lead to task-irrelevant auditory feature receiving extra processing.Spread of attention can be divided into stimulus-driven and representation-driven.Stimulus-driven spread of attention occurs when the task-irrelevant auditory stimulus is accompanied by attended visual stimulus simultaneously.Representation-driven spread of attention occurs when the representation of auditory stimulus is consistent with that of attended visual stimulus.It’s been proved by previous studies that the cross-model spread of attention is moderated by the congruency of semantics.Nevertheless,the influence that the congruency of emotion exerts on cross-model spread of attention and its neural mechanism still remain to be studied.Hence,this study aimed at investigating the stimulus-driven and representation-driven cross-modal spread of attention evoked by emotional stimulus through the technology of event-related potential(ERP).Through the pre-experiment,the standardization and assessment of 90 emotional pictures picked from Chinese Affective Picture System(CAPS)and 60 emotional sounds from International Affective Digitized Sounds(IADS)were conducted.Experiment 1 studied the modulation of emotionally audio-visual congruency towards stimulus-driven spread of attention during the task unrelated to emotion.In experiment 1,visual stimulus with positive,negative and neutral emotions as well as auditory stimulus with positive and negative emotions were displayed at the center of the screen consecutively in a randomized order.The task of participants was to respond to vogue pictures with button pressing and pay no attention to emotional and auditory information.Results showed that significant stimulus-driven spread of attention existed.The positive auditory component of audio-visual congruent condition and audio-visual incongruent condition elicited significant stimulus-driven spread of attention in the time window of 200-300 ms and 450-600 ms.What’s more was that the audio-visual incongruent condition extra evoked such effect in the time window of 400-450 ms.The negative auditory component of audio-visual congruent condition and audio-visual incongruent condition evoked significant stimulus-driven spread of attention in the time window of 250-300 ms and 450-600 ms.Besides,the audio-visual incongruent condition extra evoked the same effect in the time window of 200-250 ms.The results showed that in the emotion-irrelevant task the time window length of the stimulus-driven cross-model spread of attention which elicited in the audio-visual incongruent condition was longer than that in the audio-visual congruent condition.Experiment 2 studied the modulation of emotional audio-visual congruency towards stimulus-driven and representation-driven spread of attention during the emotion-related task.In experiment 2,participants were asked to neglect the non-target emotional pictures and auditory stimulus as well as respond with button pressing to the picture with both target emotion(positive or negative)and a red frame,which would lead to the activation of emotional representation.Results showed that significant stimulus-driven spread of attention existed in some conditions.In the negative picture task,the positive auditory component of audio-visual congruent condition elicited significant stimulus-spread of attention in the time window of 450-600 ms while incongruent condition evoked such effect in the time window of 400-450 ms.In the positive picture task,the negative auditory component of audio-visual incongruent condition evoked significant stimulus-spread of attention in the time window of 450-500 ms while no pronounced stimulus-driven spread of attention was found in the audio-visual congruent condition.Moreover,neither in the positive or negative picture task was significant representation-driven spread of attention triggered.The results showed that in the emotion-related task,emotional stimulus could not evoke representation-driven spread of attention but stimulus-driven spread of attention.And emotional congruency still could modulate the occurrence of stimulus-driven spread of attention.In a word,this study investigated if emotional stimulus could evoke the cross-model spread of attention in the emotion-irrelevant and emotion-relevant task as well as the influence that emotional congruency exerted on the cross-model spread of attention.It turned out that the stimulus-driven spread of attention was independent of the relevance between task and emotion and was modulated by emotional congruency.However,no significant emotional representation-driven spread of attention was evoked in emotion-relevant task.