Curby Kim M, Collins Jessica A
School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Biogen, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Vision (Basel). 2024 Mar 19;8(1):15. doi: 10.3390/vision8010015.
While our direct observations of the features or behaviours of the stimuli around us tell us much about them (e.g., should they be feared?), the origin of much of our knowledge is often untethered from directly observable properties (e.g., through what we have learned or have been told about them, or "semantic knowledge"). Here, we ask whether otherwise neutral visual stimuli that participants learn to associate with emotional qualities in the lab cause the stimuli to be attended in a similar way as stimuli whose emotional qualities can be discerned through their visual properties. In Experiment 1, participants learned to associate negative or neutral characteristics with neutral faces, which then served as valid or invalid spatial cues to targets in an attentional disengagement paradigm. The performance of participants higher in trait anxiety was consistent with attentional avoidance of faces with learned negative associations, while participants lower in trait anxiety showed a general response slowing in trials with these stimuli, compared to those with neutral associations. In contrast, in Experiment 2, using (visually) expressive (angry) faces, the performance of participants higher in trait anxiety was consistent with difficulty disengaging from visually threatening faces, while the performance of those with lower trait anxiety appeared unaffected by the valence of the stimuli. These findings suggest that (1) emotionality acquired indirectly via learned semantic knowledge impacts how attention is allocated to face stimuli, and this impact is influenced by trait anxiety, and (2) there are differences in the effects of stimulus emotionality depending on whether it is acquired indirectly or directly via the perceptual features of the stimulus. These differences are discussed in the context of the variability of attention bias effects reported in the literature and the time course of impacts of emotionality on stimulus processing.
虽然我们对周围刺激物的特征或行为的直接观察能让我们了解很多关于它们的信息（例如，它们是否应该让人害怕？），但我们很多知识的来源往往与直接可观察的属性无关（例如，通过我们所学或所被告知的关于它们的信息，即“语义知识”）。在这里，我们要问的是，参与者在实验室中学会与情感特质相关联的原本中性的视觉刺激物，是否会像那些其情感特质可通过视觉属性辨别出来的刺激物一样，以类似的方式被关注。在实验1中，参与者学会将负面或中性特征与中性面孔相关联，然后这些面孔在注意力脱离范式中作为对目标的有效或无效空间线索。特质焦虑较高的参与者的表现与对具有习得负面关联的面孔的注意力回避一致，而特质焦虑较低的参与者在面对这些刺激物的试验中，与具有中性关联的刺激物相比，普遍反应速度减慢。相比之下，在实验2中，使用（视觉上）有表现力的（愤怒的）面孔，特质焦虑较高的参与者的表现与难以从视觉上具有威胁性的面孔上脱离注意力一致，而特质焦虑较低的参与者的表现似乎不受刺激物效价的影响。这些发现表明：（1）通过习得的语义知识间接获得的情感性会影响对面孔刺激物的注意力分配方式，并且这种影响受特质焦虑的影响；（2）刺激物情感性通过刺激物的感知特征直接或间接获得时，其效果存在差异。这些差异将在文献中报道的注意力偏差效应的变异性以及情感性对刺激物加工影响的时间进程的背景下进行讨论。
