Defining the brain mechanisms underlying initial emotional evaluation is a key but unexplored clue to understanding affective processing. Event-related potentials (ERPs), especially suited for investigating this issue, were recorded in two experiments (n = 36 and n = 35). We presented emotionally negative (spiders) and neutral (wheels) silhouettes homogenized regarding their visual parameters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElectrophysiological and behavioural correlates of true and false memories were examined in the Deese/Roediger-McDermont (DRM) paradigm. A mass univariate approach for analysing event-related potentials (ERP) in the temporal domain was used to examine the electrophysiological effects associated with this paradigm precisely (point-by-point) and without bias (data-driven). Behaviourally, true and false recognition did not differ, and the predicted DRM effect was observed, as false recognition of critical lures (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF. Schizotypy, a potential phenotype for schizophrenia, is a personality trait that depicts psychosis-like signs in the normal range of psychosis continuum. Family communication may affect the social functioning of people with schizotypy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA large number of publications have focused on the study of pain expressions. Despite the growing knowledge, the availability of pain-related face databases is still very scarce compared with other emotional facial expressions. The Pain E-Motion Faces Database (PEMF) is a new open-access database currently consisting of 272 micro-clips of 68 different identities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral studies suggest that the menstrual cycle affects emotional processing. However, these results may be biased by including women with premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in the samples. PMS is characterized by negative emotional symptomatology, such as depression and/or anxiety, during the luteal phase.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research shows that dynamic stimuli, on the one hand, and emotional stimuli, on the other, capture exogenous attention due to their biological relevance. Through neural (ERPs) and behavioral measures (reaction times and errors), the present study explored the combined effect of looming motion and emotional content on attentional capture. To this end, 3D-recreated static and dynamic animals assessed as emotional (positive or negative) or neutral were presented as distractors while 71 volunteers performed a line orientation task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlpha-band oscillations (8-14 Hz) are essential for attention and perception processes by facilitating the selection of relevant information. Directing visuospatial endogenous (voluntary) attention to a given location consistently results in a power suppression of alpha activity over occipito-parietal areas contralateral to the attended visual field. In contrast, the neural oscillatory dynamics underlying the involuntary capture of attention, or exogenous attention, are currently under debate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral cortical and subcortical brain areas have been reported to be sensitive to the emotional content of subliminal stimuli. However, the timing of these activations remains unclear. Our scope was to detect the earliest cortical traces of emotional unconscious processing of visual stimuli by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) from 43 participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReward affects our attention to stimuli, prioritizing those that lead to high-value outcomes. Recently, it has been suggested that such reward-related cognitive prioritization might be associated with the process of learning new stimulus-response (S-R) associations, because both are acquired through extended reward training, and once established, they are hard to overcome. We used event-related potentials (ERP) to analyze the contribution of S-R links to the formation of reward-related cognitive prioritization during reinforcement learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHabituation to ethnic ingroup members has been reported to be greater than to ethnic outgroup members. This pattern could be due to the lack of perceptive experience (familiarity) with outgroup facial morphs or, alternatively, to the prejudice held toward that outgroup. We explored this disjunctive in 71 participants, all Spanish, who were experimentally habituated to faces from their Ingroup and to faces from two unfamiliar outgroups, one for which there is low probability of prejudice in this population (Non-prejudiced Outgroup), and one for which the probability of prejudice is higher (Prejudiced Outgroup).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research shows that endogenous attention (the controlled selection of certain aspects of our environment) is enhanced toward emotional stimuli due to its biological relevance. Although looming affective stimuli such as threat seem even more critical for survival, little is known about their effect on endogenous attention. Here, we recorded neural (event-related potentials, ERPs) and behavioral responses (errors and reaction times) to explore the combined effect of emotion and looming motion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExogenous attention allows the automatic detection of relevant stimuli and the reorientation of our current focus of attention towards them. Faces from an ethnic outgroup tend to capture exogenous attention to a greater extent than faces from an ethnic ingroup. We explored whether prejudice toward the outgroup, rather than lack of familiarity, is driving this effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScarce previous data on how the location where an emotional stimulus appears in the visual scene modulates its perception suggest that, for functional reasons, a perceptual advantage may exist, vertically, for stimuli presented at the lower visual field (LoVF) and, horizontally, for stimuli presented at the left visual field (LeVF). However, this issue has been explored through a limited number of spatial locations, usually in a single spatial dimension (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) combining MEG/EEG with behavioral data have described two main time ranges relating to conscious perception: 130-320 (the visual awareness negativity; VAN) and 300-500 (P3a) ms after stimulus onset. At the same time, two event-related potential (ERP) peaks have shown an emotional modulation of endogenous attention: the early posterior negativity (EPN; peaking around 250 msec) and the late positive potential (LPP, peaking around 600 msec). Furthermore, an emotional bias on conscious perception has been reported in Binocular Rivalry (BR) studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough response inhibition is thought to be important in borderline personality disorder (BPD), little is known about its neurophysiological basis. This study aimed to provide insight into this issue by capitalizaing on the high temporal resolution of electroencephalography and information provided by source localization methods. To this end, twenty unmedicated patients with BPD and 20 healthy control subjects performed a modified go/no-go task designed to better isolate the brain activity specifically associated with response inhibition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe social content of affective stimuli has been proposed as having an influence on cognitive processing and behaviour. This research was aimed, therefore, at studying whether automatic exogenous attention demanded by affective pictures was related to their social value. We hypothesised that affective social pictures would capture attention to a greater extent than non-social affective stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the current study, we investigated the effects of short-term visual deprivation (2 h) on a haptic recognition memory task with familiar objects. Behavioral data, as well as event-related potentials (ERPs) and induced event-related oscillations (EROs) were analyzed. At the behavioral level, deprived participants showed speeded reaction times to new stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe interplay between exogenous attention to emotional distractors and the baseline affective state has not been well established yet. The present study aimed to explore this issue through behavioral measures and event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants (N = 30) completed a digit categorization task depicted over negative, positive or neutral distractor background pictures, while they experienced negative, positive and neutral affective states elicited by movie scenes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNumerous electrophysiological findings support the notion that selective attention modulates alpha oscillatory activity. Specifically, alpha enhancement and suppression can be dissociated in time and space. It is now accepted that selective attention operates in either the perceptual or the representational environments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExogenous attention is a set of mechanisms that allow us to detect and reorient toward salient events-such as appetitive or aversive-that appear out of the current focus of attention. The nature of these mechanisms, particularly the involvement of the parvocellular and magnocellular visual processing systems, was explored. Thirty-four participants performed a demanding digit categorization task while salient (spiders or S) and neutral (wheels or W) stimuli were presented as distractors under two figure-ground formats: heterochromatic/isoluminant (exclusively processed by the parvocellular system, Par trials) and isochromatic/heteroluminant (preferentially processed by the magnocellular system, Mag trials).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch has consistently shown that threat stimuli automatically attract attention in order to activate the defensive response systems. Recent findings have provided evidence that snakes tuned the visual system of evolving primates for their astute detection, particularly under challenging perceptual conditions. The goal of the present study was to measure behavioral and electrophysiological indices of exogenous attention to snakes, compared with spiders - matched for rated fear levels but for which sources of natural selection are less well grounded, and to innocuous animals (birds), which were presented as distracters, while participants were engaged in a letter discrimination task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlanet Earth's motion yields a 50 % day-50 % night yearly balance in every latitude or longitude, so survival must be guaranteed in very different light conditions in many species, including human. Cone- and rod-dominant vision, respectively specialized in light and darkness, present several processing differences, which are-at least partially-reflected in event-related potentials (ERPs). The present experiment aimed at characterizing exogenous attention to threatening (spiders) and neutral (wheels) distractors in two environmental light conditions, low mesopic (L, 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMemorizing emotional stimuli in a preferential way seems to be one of the adaptive strategies brought on by evolution for supporting survival. However, there is a lack of electrophysiological evidence on this bias in working memory. The present study analyzed the influence of emotion on the updating component of working memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVisual stimulation is frequently employed in electroencephalographic (EEG) research. However, despite its widespread use, no studies have thoroughly evaluated how the morphology of the visual event-related potentials (ERPs) varies according to the spatial location of stimuli. Hence, the purpose of this study was to perform a detailed retinotopic mapping of visual ERPs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDue to heterogeneous photoreceptor distribution, spatial location of stimulation is crucial to study visual brain activity in different light environments. This unexplored issue was studied through occipital event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded from 40 participants in response to discrete visual stimuli presented at different locations and in two environmental light conditions, low mesopic (L, 0.03 lux) and high mesopic (H, 6.
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