Ferrari Vera, Canturi Francesca, De Cesarei Andrea, Codispoti Maurizio
Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Parma, Parma, Italy.
Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2024 Feb 7;15:1322792. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1322792. eCollection 2024.
Research has recently shown that behavioral interference prompted by emotional distractors is subject to habituation when the same exemplars are repeated, but promptly recovers in response to novel stimuli. The present study investigated whether prolonged experience with distractors that were all novel was effective in shaping the attentional filter, favoring stable and generalizable inhibition effects.
To test this, the impact of emotional distractors was measured before and after a sustained training phase with only novel distractor pictures, and that for a group of participants depicted only a variety of neutral contents, whereas a different group was exposed only to emotional contents.
Results showed that emotional interference on reaction times was attenuated after the training phase (compared to the pre-test), but emotional distractors continued to interfere more than neutral ones in the post-test. The two groups did not differ in terms of training effect, suggesting that the distractor suppression mechanism developed during training was not sensitive to the affective category of natural scenes with which one had had experience. The affective modulation of neither the LPP or Alpha-ERD showed any effect of training.
Altogether, these findings suggest that sustained experience with novel distractors may attenuate attention allocation toward task irrelevant emotional stimuli, but the evaluative processes and the engagement of motivational systems are always needed to support the monitoring of the environment for significant cues.
最近的研究表明，当相同的范例重复出现时，由情绪干扰物引发的行为干扰会出现习惯化，但对新刺激会迅速恢复。本研究调查了长时间接触全新的干扰物是否能有效塑造注意力过滤器，从而产生稳定且可推广的抑制效果。
为了验证这一点，在仅使用全新干扰物图片的持续训练阶段前后，测量了情绪干扰物的影响，一组参与者看到的图片仅包含各种中性内容，而另一组仅接触情绪性内容。
结果显示，训练阶段后（与测试前相比），情绪干扰对反应时间的影响减弱，但在测试后，情绪干扰物的干扰仍比中性干扰物更大。两组在训练效果方面没有差异，这表明训练过程中形成的干扰物抑制机制对所接触的自然场景的情感类别不敏感。训练对LPP或Alpha - ERD的情感调制均未产生任何影响。
总体而言，这些发现表明，长时间接触全新的干扰物可能会减少对与任务无关的情绪刺激的注意力分配，但始终需要评估过程和动机系统的参与来支持对环境中重要线索的监测。
