Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London.
Department of Psychology and Ergonomics, Berlin Institute of Technology.
Emotion. 2014 Dec;14(6):1007-13. doi: 10.1037/a0037945. Epub 2014 Oct 6.
Emotional stimuli (e.g., negative facial expressions) enjoy prioritized memory access when task relevant, consistent with their ability to capture attention. Whether emotional expression also impacts on memory access when task-irrelevant is important for arbitrating between feature-based and object-based attentional capture. Here, the authors address this question in 3 experiments using an attentional blink task with face photographs as first and second target (T1, T2). They demonstrate reduced neutral T2 identity recognition after angry or happy T1 expression, compared to neutral T1, and this supports attentional capture by a task-irrelevant feature. Crucially, after neutral T1, T2 identity recognition was enhanced and not suppressed when T2 was angry-suggesting that attentional capture by this task-irrelevant feature may be object-based and not feature-based. As an unexpected finding, both angry and happy facial expressions suppress memory access for competing objects, but only angry facial expression enjoyed privileged memory access. This could imply that these 2 processes are relatively independent from one another.
情绪刺激（例如，负面面部表情）在与任务相关时享有优先的记忆访问权，这与其吸引注意力的能力一致。当任务无关时，情绪表达是否也会影响记忆访问，这对于在基于特征和基于对象的注意力捕获之间进行仲裁很重要。在使用面孔照片作为第一和第二目标（T1、T2）的注意瞬脱任务中，作者通过 3 个实验解决了这个问题。他们证明，与中性 T1 相比，愤怒或高兴的 T1 表情后中性 T2 的身份识别能力降低，这支持了任务无关特征的注意力捕获。至关重要的是，在中性 T1 之后，当 T2 是愤怒的时，T2 的身份识别得到增强而不是受到抑制——这表明这种任务无关特征的注意力捕获可能是基于对象的，而不是基于特征的。作为一个意外的发现，愤怒和高兴的面部表情都会抑制对竞争物体的记忆访问，但只有愤怒的面部表情享有特权的记忆访问。这可能意味着这两个过程彼此相对独立。
