School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
Cortex. 2024 Oct;179:286-300. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.07.014. Epub 2024 Aug 22.
In this study, we assessed whether predictability affected the early processing of facial expressions. To achieve this, we measured lateralised early- and mid-latency event-related potentials associated with visual processing. Twenty-two participants were shown pairs of bilaterally presented fearful, happy, angry, or scrambled faces. Participants were required to identify angry faces on a spatially attended side whilst ignoring happy, fearful, and scrambled faces. Each block began with the word HAPPY or FEARFUL which informed participants the probability at which these faces would appear. Attention effects were found for the lateralised P1, suggesting that emotions do not modulate the P1 differentially, nor do predictions relating to emotions. Pairwise comparisons demonstrated that, when spatially unattended, unpredicted fearful faces produced larger lateralised N170 amplitudes compared to predicted fearful faces and unpredicted happy faces. Finally, attention towards faces increased lateralised EPN amplitudes, as did both fearful expressions and low predictability. Thus, we demonstrate that the N170 and EPN are sensitive to top-down predictions relating to facial expressions and that low predictability appears to specifically affect the early encoding of fearful faces when unattended, possibly to initiate attentional capture.
在这项研究中，我们评估了可预测性是否会影响面部表情的早期处理。为此，我们测量了与视觉处理相关的侧化早期和中期潜伏期事件相关电位。22 名参与者观看了成对的双侧呈现的恐惧、快乐、愤怒或混乱的面孔。参与者被要求在空间上注意的一侧识别愤怒的面孔，同时忽略快乐、恐惧和混乱的面孔。每个块以单词 HAPPY 或 FEARFUL 开头，告知参与者这些面孔出现的概率。发现了侧化 P1 的注意效应，表明情绪不会使 P1 产生差异，也不会使与情绪相关的预测产生差异。成对比较表明，当空间上不注意时，未预测到的恐惧面孔产生的侧化 N170 振幅大于预测到的恐惧面孔和未预测到的快乐面孔。最后，对面孔的注意力增加了侧化 EPN 振幅，恐惧表情和低可预测性也是如此。因此，我们证明 N170 和 EPN 对与面部表情相关的自上而下的预测很敏感，并且低可预测性似乎会在不注意时特别影响恐惧面孔的早期编码，可能会引发注意力捕获。
