Sutherland Matthew R, Mather Mara
a Rotman Research Institute , Baycrest Hospital , Toronto , ON , Canada.
b Department of Psychology, Leonard Davis School of Gerontology , University of Southern California , Los Angeles , CA , USA.
Cogn Emot. 2018 May;32(3):616-622. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2017.1330189. Epub 2017 Jun 1.
Previous findings indicate that negative arousal enhances bottom-up attention biases favouring perceptual salient stimuli over less salient stimuli. The current study tests whether those effects were driven by emotional arousal or by negative valence by comparing how well participants could identify visually presented letters after hearing either a negative arousing, positive arousing or neutral sound. On each trial, some letters were presented in a high contrast font and some in a low contrast font, creating a set of targets that differed in perceptual salience. Sounds rated as more emotionally arousing led to more identification of highly salient letters but not of less salient letters, whereas sounds' valence ratings did not impact salience biases. Thus, arousal, rather than valence, is a key factor enhancing visual processing of perceptually salient targets.
先前的研究结果表明，负性唤醒会增强自下而上的注意偏向，使个体更倾向于关注知觉上显著的刺激，而非不太显著的刺激。本研究通过比较参与者在听到负性唤醒、正性唤醒或中性声音后识别视觉呈现字母的能力，来测试这些效应是由情绪唤醒还是负性效价驱动的。在每次试验中，一些字母以高对比度字体呈现，一些以低对比度字体呈现，从而创建了一组在知觉显著性上不同的目标。被评为情绪唤醒程度更高的声音会导致对高显著性字母的更多识别，但对低显著性字母则不然，而声音的效价评级并未影响显著性偏向。因此，唤醒而非效价是增强对知觉上显著目标的视觉加工的关键因素。
