Dhinakaran Janani, De Vos Maarten, Thorne Jeremy D, Kranczioch Cornelia
Neuropsychology Lab, Department of Psychology, European Medical School, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, 26111, Oldenburg, Germany.
Exp Brain Res. 2014 Jun;232(6):1895-903. doi: 10.1007/s00221-014-3881-5. Epub 2014 Mar 1.
Neuroticism and negative affect have been associated with an increase in attentional investment and the greater processing of irrelevant stimuli. Previous research proposes the overinvestment of attention and a focused mental state as the mechanism of this effect. We investigated the neural correlates of this idea using a dual-stream rapid serial visual presentation paradigm with centrally presented, overlapping streams of letters that changed at different frequencies. Participants attended one stream at a time. We predicted that the more focused cognitive style associated with higher neuroticism would be reflected in the overinvestment of attention in the irrelevant stream of to-be-ignored letters, in particular, when the ignored stream was the more salient one. This was expected to lead to a smaller difference in power between the attended and unattended frequencies. Results showed that power differences between attended and unattended streams were negatively correlated with neuroticism scores in direct support of our hypothesis. Exploratory correlations also showed that extraversion was positively related to the attention difference. As extraversion has been contrasted to neuroticism and linked to increased cognitive flexibility and control in previous studies, it is possible that this trait may help in disengagement from salient stimuli. Together, these results provide the first neural correlates of the focused cognitive style idea. That the effect of extraversion is seen in the centro-parietal region and the effect of neuroticism is seen in the occipital region, indicate that these personality traits may affect the hierarchy of visual information processing. These findings provide new insight into the influence of personality traits on attention mechanisms and open up questions regarding the relationship between neuroticism, extraversion and information processing.
神经质和消极情绪与注意力投入的增加以及对无关刺激的更多加工有关。先前的研究提出注意力过度投入和专注的心理状态是这种效应的机制。我们使用双流快速序列视觉呈现范式进行研究，该范式中，中央呈现的字母流相互重叠且以不同频率变化，参与者每次关注其中一个流。我们预测，与较高神经质相关的更专注的认知风格将体现在对要忽略的无关字母流的注意力过度投入上，特别是当被忽略的流更突出时。这预计会导致被关注频率和未被关注频率之间的功率差异更小。结果表明，被关注流和未被关注流之间的功率差异与神经质得分呈负相关，直接支持了我们的假设。探索性相关性分析还表明，外向性与注意力差异呈正相关。由于在先前的研究中，外向性与神经质形成对比，并与认知灵活性和控制的增加相关联，所以这种特质可能有助于从突出刺激中脱离出来。总之，这些结果首次提供了专注认知风格观点的神经关联证据。外向性的效应出现在中央顶叶区域，而神经质的效应出现在枕叶区域，这表明这些人格特质可能会影响视觉信息处理的层次结构。这些发现为人格特质对注意力机制的影响提供了新的见解，并引发了关于神经质、外向性与信息处理之间关系的问题。
