Attention and Emotion

Question 1

Describe the response competition paradigm?

Answer 1

 Respond to underlined letter ignoring the distractor letter.
 Participants are faster if response letter is the same as distractor and slower if they are different
 Low perceptual load – Identify central letter but only respond if the shape next to the letter is red not blue
 High perceptual load – Identify central letter but only respond if the shape next to it is red not blue, green or yellow and a square not a circle, triangle or diamond

Question 2

What happens to unattended visual stimuli?

Answer 2

 High perceptual load – unattended stimuli is not processed
 Low perceptual load – Spare resources process unattended stimuli, hence distractor letters in task have a greater impact on RT’s under low perceptual load conditions

Question 3

What is found in the emotional stroop task?

Answer 3

 Participants take longer to name the colour of the words when they are threatening
 This was also found in visual experiments

Question 4

What could be the cause for threat bias? Is there evidence for this?

Answer 4

 Amygdala feedback connections boost activation of neural representations for emotional stimuli
 Neuro-typical participants were less likely to miss aversive words in an attentional blink study than those that had amygdala damage

Question 5

Is emotional threat bias automatic?

Answer 5

 Pessoa et al found amygdala activation to be sensitive to emotional stimuli only when attention was directed suggesting emotion processing is not automatic
 However other studies have shown that amygdala is activated with both directed and undirected attention. Possibly due to perceptual load of tasks