Cai Chen, Zhang Le, Guo Zitao, Fang Xin, Quan Zihan
Department of Psychology, Normal College, Qingdao University, Qingdao, Shandong, China.
School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
Front Psychol. 2024 Sep 9;15:1433277. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1433277. eCollection 2024.
The visual search for product packaging involves intricate cognitive processes that are prominently impacted by learned associations derived from extensive long-term experiences. The present research employed EEG technology and manipulated the color display of reference pictures on beverage bottles to explore the underlying neurocognitive pathways. Specifically, we aimed to investigate the influence of color-flavor association strength on the visual processing of such stimuli as well as the in-depth neural mechanisms. The behavioral results revealed that stimuli with strong association strength triggered the fastest response and the highest accuracy, compared with the stimuli with weak association strength and the achromatic ones. The EEG findings further substantiated that the chromatic stimuli evoked a more pronounced N2 component than achromatic ones, and the stimuli with strong association strength elicited larger P3 and smaller N400 amplitudes than the ones with weak association strength. Additionally, the source localization using sLORETA showed significant activations in the inferior temporal gyrus. In conclusion, our research suggests that (1) color expectations would guide visual search process and trigger faster responses to congruent visual stimuli, (2) both the initial perceptual representation and subsequent semantic representation play pivotal roles in effective visual search for the targets, and (3) the color-flavor association strength potentially exerts an impact on visual processing by modulating memory accessibility.
对产品包装的视觉搜索涉及复杂的认知过程，这些过程受到从广泛的长期经验中获得的习得关联的显著影响。本研究采用脑电图技术，操纵饮料瓶上参考图片的颜色显示，以探索潜在的神经认知途径。具体而言，我们旨在研究颜色 - 味道关联强度对这类刺激视觉加工的影响以及深入的神经机制。行为结果显示，与关联强度弱的刺激和无色刺激相比，关联强度强的刺激引发的反应最快且准确率最高。脑电图研究结果进一步证实，彩色刺激比无色刺激诱发更明显的N2成分，且关联强度强的刺激比关联强度弱的刺激诱发更大的P3波幅和更小的N400波幅。此外，使用sLORETA进行的源定位显示颞下回有显著激活。总之，我们的研究表明：（1）颜色预期会引导视觉搜索过程并触发对一致视觉刺激的更快反应；（2）初始的感知表征和随后的语义表征在对目标的有效视觉搜索中都起着关键作用；（3）颜色 - 味道关联强度可能通过调节记忆可及性对视觉加工产生影响。
