de Echegaray Javier, Keil Andreas, Müller Matthias M
Wilhelm Wundt Institute for Psychology, University of Leipzig, Neumarkt 9-19, Leipzig 04109, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, United States.
Cereb Cortex. 2024 Dec 3;34(12). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhae428.
Salient emotional visual cues receive prioritized processing in human visual cortex. To what extent emotional facilitation relies on preattentional stimulus processing preceding semantic analysis remains controversial. Making use of steady-state visual evoke potentials frequency-tagged to meaningful complex emotional scenes and their scrambled versions, presented in a 4-Hz rapid serial visual presentation fashion, the current study tested temporal dynamics of semantic and emotional cue processing. The neural dynamics of bottom-up capture of attention driven by concrete images were analyzed under a passive-viewing-like scenario and in a competitive context, where a concurrent foreground task realized with a random dot kinematogram flickering at 15 Hz enabled the concurrent monitoring of top-down selective attention. Aligned with the semantic primacy hypothesis, the steady-state visual evoke potentials' results provide evidence of an initial rapid capture of attention driven by objecthood, followed by heightened deployment of attentional resources to emotional scenes that remained stable for the entire stimulation period. We replicated previous findings in which emotional distractors first prompt visuocortical facilitation, followed by suppression of a concurrent foreground task. Modeling this time-delayed competition process fit the data better than a time-invariant trade-off between concurrent cues as assumed by most models of selective attention.
显著的情感视觉线索在人类视觉皮层中会得到优先处理。情感促进在多大程度上依赖于语义分析之前的预注意刺激处理仍存在争议。本研究利用以4赫兹快速序列视觉呈现方式呈现的、与有意义的复杂情感场景及其打乱版本频率标记的稳态视觉诱发电位，测试了语义和情感线索处理的时间动态。在类似被动观看的场景以及竞争情境下，分析了由具体图像驱动的自下而上的注意力捕捉的神经动力学，在竞争情境中，一个以15赫兹闪烁的随机点运动图实现的并发前景任务能够同时监测自上而下选择性注意力。与语义优先假设一致，稳态视觉诱发电位的结果提供了证据，表明注意力最初由物体属性驱动快速捕捉，随后注意力资源更多地部署到在整个刺激期保持稳定的情感场景上。我们重复了之前的发现，即情感干扰物首先促使视觉皮层促进，随后抑制并发的前景任务。对这个延迟竞争过程进行建模比大多数选择性注意模型所假设的并发线索之间的时不变权衡更能拟合数据。
