De Cesarei Andrea, Tronelli Virginia, Mastria Serena, Ferrari Vera, Codispoti Maurizio
Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat, 5, 40127 Bologna, Italy.
Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Parma, Via Volturno, 39, 43125 Parma, Italy.
Vision (Basel). 2025 Aug 1;9(3):66. doi: 10.3390/vision9030066.
Previous studies observed that emotional scenes, presented as distractors, capture attention and interfere with an ongoing task. This behavioral interference has been shown to be elicited by the semantic rather than by the perceptual properties of a scene, as it resisted the application of low-pass spatial frequency filters. Some studies observed that the visual system can adapt to perceptual conditions; however, little is known concerning whether attentional capture by emotional stimuli can also be modulated by the sequential repetition of viewing conditions or of emotional content. In the present study, we asked participants to perform a parity task while viewing irrelevant natural scenes, which could be either emotional or neutral. These scenes could be either blurred (low-pass filter) or perceptually intact, and the order of presentation was balanced to study the effects of sequential repetition of perceptual conditions. The results indicate that affective modulation was most pronounced when the same viewing condition (either intact or blurred) was repeated, with faster responses when perceptual conditions were repeated for neutral distractors, but to a lesser extent for emotional ones. These data suggest that emotional interference in an attentional task can be modulated by serial sensitization in the processing of spatial frequencies.
先前的研究观察到，作为干扰物呈现的情感场景会吸引注意力并干扰正在进行的任务。这种行为干扰已被证明是由场景的语义而非感知属性引发的，因为它能抵抗低通空间频率滤波器的应用。一些研究观察到视觉系统可以适应感知条件；然而，关于情感刺激引起的注意力捕获是否也能通过观看条件或情感内容的顺序重复来调节，我们知之甚少。在本研究中，我们要求参与者在观看无关的自然场景时执行奇偶任务，这些场景可以是情感性的或中性的。这些场景可以是模糊的（低通滤波器）或感知完整的，并且呈现顺序是平衡的，以研究感知条件顺序重复的影响。结果表明，当重复相同的观看条件（无论是完整的还是模糊的）时，情感调制最为明显，对于中性干扰物，当感知条件重复时反应更快，但对于情感干扰物则程度较小。这些数据表明，注意力任务中的情感干扰可以通过空间频率处理中的序列敏化来调节。
