Task irrelevant emotion effects on top-down attention: an ERP study

Abstract

It has been shown that emotional stimuli can attract attention away from the task at hand, resulting in slowed reaction times. However, there are still discrepancies regarding the exact conditions and temporal dynamics under which this preferential mechanism operates. To investigate the matter further, an ERP experiment using peripherally presented fearful and neutral faces was conducted. Emotion was kept task irrelevant in all conditions by having participants solve a simple gender discrimination task on faces presented at precued locations. Behavioural results indicated that fearful faces were responded to slower and with decreased accuracy rates. No modulatory effects of emotion on ERPs sensitive to the allocation of spatial attention were found. Nevertheless, strong emotion effects were observed in the form of a late positive component (LPP), suggesting that affective and top-down attention work independently and that emotion only gains precedence after attentional resources are left over from processing task relevant information, prolonging disengagement from emotional faces and thereby affecting response times.