Attention Capture of Non-target Emotional Faces: An Evidence From Reward Learning

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Xing Zhou¹  Bixuan Du¹  Zhiqing Wei²  Weiqi He¹ 

[1] Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University;School of Psychology, Northwest Normal University

关键词: reward learning;    emotional face;    task irrelevant;    attentional capture;    distractor;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03004

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The aim of this study was to explore whether reward learning would affect the processing of targets when an emotional stimulus was task irrelevant. In the current study, using a visual search paradigm to establish an association between emotional faces and reward, an emotional face appeared as a task-irrelevant distractor during the test after reward learning, and participants were asked to judge the orientation of a line on the face. In experiment 1, no significant difference was found between the high reward-fear distractor condition and the no reward-neutral condition, but the response times of the high reward-fear condition were significantly longer than those of the low reward-happy condition. In experiment 2, there was no significant difference in participants’ performance between high reward-happy and no reward-neutral responses. In addition, response times of the low reward-fear condition wear significantly longer than those of the high reward-happy and no reward-neutral conditions. The results show that reward learning affects attention bias of task-irrelevant emotional faces even when reward is absent. Moreover, the high reward selection history is more effective in weakening the emotional advantage of the processing advantage than the low reward.

【 授权许可】

CC BY