Vormbrock Ria, Bruchmann Maximilian, Menne Lucas, Straube Thomas, Schindler Sebastian
Institute of Medical Psychology and Systems Neuroscience, University of Muenster, Germany.
Institute of Medical Psychology and Systems Neuroscience, University of Muenster, Germany; Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Muenster, Germany.
Cortex. 2023 Mar;160:9-23. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.12.011. Epub 2022 Dec 30.
Fearful facial expressions are prioritized across different information processing stages, as evident in early, intermediate, and late components of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Recent studies showed that, in contrast to early N170 modulations, mid-latency (Early Posterior Negativity, EPN) and late (Late Positive Potential, LPP) emotional modulations depend on the attended perceptual feature. Nevertheless, several studies reported significant differences between emotional and neutral faces for the EPN or LPP components during distraction tasks. One cause for these conflicting findings might be that when faces are presented sufficiently long, participants attend to task-irrelevant features of the faces. In this registered report, we tested whether the presentation duration of faces is the critical factor for differences between reported emotional modulations during perceptual distraction tasks. To this end, 48 participants were required to discriminate the orientation of lines overlaid onto fearful or neutral faces, while face presentation varied (100 msec, 300 msec, 1,000 msec, 2,000 msec). While participants did not need to pay attention to the faces, we observed main effects of emotion for the EPN and LPP, but no interaction between emotion and presentation duration. Of note, unregistered exploratory tests per presentation duration showed no significant EPN and LPP emotion differences during short durations (100 and 300 msec) but significant differences with longer durations. While the presentation duration seems not to be a critical factor for EPN and LPP emotion effects, future studies are needed to investigate the role of threshold effects and the applied analytic designs to explain conflicting findings in the literature.
恐惧的面部表情在不同的信息处理阶段都具有优先性，这在事件相关脑电位（ERP）的早期、中期和晚期成分中都很明显。最近的研究表明，与早期的N170调制不同，中潜伏期（早期后部负波，EPN）和晚期（晚期正波，LPP）的情绪调制取决于所关注的感知特征。然而，几项研究报告称，在分心任务中，EPN或LPP成分在情绪面孔和中性面孔之间存在显著差异。这些相互矛盾的发现的一个原因可能是，当面孔呈现足够长的时间时，参与者会关注面孔与任务无关的特征。在本预注册报告中，我们测试了面孔的呈现持续时间是否是感知分心任务中报告的情绪调制差异的关键因素。为此，48名参与者被要求辨别叠加在恐惧或中性面孔上的线条的方向，同时面孔呈现时间有所不同（100毫秒、300毫秒、1000毫秒、2000毫秒）。虽然参与者不需要关注面孔，但我们观察到EPN和LPP的情绪主效应，但情绪和呈现持续时间之间没有交互作用。值得注意的是，每个呈现持续时间的未注册探索性测试表明，在短时间（100毫秒和300毫秒）内，EPN和LPP的情绪差异不显著，但在较长时间内差异显著。虽然呈现持续时间似乎不是EPN和LPP情绪效应的关键因素，但未来的研究需要调查阈值效应的作用以及所应用的分析设计，以解释文献中的相互矛盾的发现。
