Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Neurosci Lett. 2021 Jan 18;742:135550. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2020.135550. Epub 2020 Dec 4.
The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of working memory load on the gaze cueing effect in high and low trait-anxious participants, using electroencephalography. Fearful and neutral faces predicted the location of a target, which was a digit that participants were asked to recall from a series encoded in each trial, in a modified version of the attentional cueing task. Working memory load impacted cueing irrespective of emotion and anxiety in analysis of reaction times. Lateralized EEG components then showed that effects of emotion were only apparent in high anxious individuals, with an initial hypervigilance to target locations cued by fearful faces, followed by a difficulty to disengage from these locations when targets appeared at uncued sites (P1). Enhanced amplitude following fearful faces was observed, when discriminative processes leading to response selection are implemented (N1). Conversely, all the effects of working memory load were independent of emotion in the low anxious group, where the shifting of attention directed by the gaze was only visible when enough resources were available in the working memory span. Working memory loads impacted the processing of gaze differently (P1) in low anxious participants, suggesting that top-down influence may play a role in this case.
本研究旨在使用脑电图研究工作记忆负荷对视线索效应的影响在高、低特质焦虑参与者中的作用。在注意力线索任务的修改版本中，恐惧和中性面孔预测了目标的位置，参与者被要求从每个试验中编码的一系列数字中回忆起目标。在反应时分析中，无论情绪和焦虑如何，工作记忆负荷都会影响线索。然后，侧向脑电图成分表明，情绪的影响仅在高焦虑个体中明显，最初对恐惧面孔提示的目标位置过度警觉，随后当目标出现在未提示位置时难以从这些位置脱离（P1）。当实施导致反应选择的判别过程时，观察到跟随恐惧面孔的增强幅度（N1）。相反，在低焦虑组中，工作记忆负荷的所有影响都与情绪无关，只有在工作记忆广度中有足够的资源时，由注视引导的注意力转移才可见。工作记忆负荷对视线索的处理方式不同（P1），这表明自上而下的影响可能在这种情况下起作用。
