Department of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2011 May;140(2):272-82. doi: 10.1037/a0023188.
It is generally assumed that emotion facilitates human vision in order to promote adaptive responses to a potential threat in the environment. Surprisingly, we recently found that emotion in some cases impairs the perception of elementary visual features (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009b). Here, we demonstrate that emotion improves fast temporal vision at the expense of fine-grained spatial vision. We tested participants' threshold resolution with Landolt circles containing a small spatial or brief temporal discontinuity. The prior presentation of a fearful face cue, compared with a neutral face cue, impaired spatial resolution but improved temporal resolution. In addition, we show that these benefits and deficits were triggered selectively by the global configural properties of the faces, which were transmitted only through low spatial frequencies. Critically, the common locus of these opposite effects suggests a trade-off between magno- and parvocellular-type visual channels, which contradicts the common assumption that emotion invariably improves vision. We show that, rather than being a general "boost" for all visual features, affective neural circuits sacrifice the slower processing of small details for a coarser but faster visual signal.
人们普遍认为，情绪可以促进人类的视觉，从而促使人们对环境中的潜在威胁做出适应性反应。但令人惊讶的是，我们最近发现，在某些情况下，情绪会损害对基本视觉特征的感知（Bocanegra & Zeelenberg，2009b）。在这里，我们证明了情绪可以提高快速的时间视觉，而牺牲精细的空间视觉。我们使用包含小空间或短暂时间不连续性的 Landolt 环来测试参与者的阈值分辨率。与中性面孔提示相比，先呈现恐惧面孔提示会损害空间分辨率，但会提高时间分辨率。此外，我们还表明，这些优势和劣势是由面孔的全局结构特性选择性触发的，这些特性仅通过低空间频率传递。关键的是，这些相反效应的共同作用部位表明，在视大细胞和视小细胞类型的视觉通道之间存在权衡，这与情绪总是改善视觉的普遍假设相矛盾。我们表明，情感神经回路并不是对所有视觉特征都进行普遍的“增强”，而是牺牲较慢的小细节处理，以获得更粗糙但更快的视觉信号。
