The present study provides evidence that the activation strength produced by emotional stimuli must pass a threshold level in order to be consciously perceived, contrary to the assumption of continuous quality of representation. An analysis of receiver operating characteristics for attentional blink performance was used to distinguish between two models of emotion perception by inspecting two different ROC’s shapes. Across all conditions, the results showed that performance in the attentional blink task was better described by the two-limbs ROC predicted by (...) the Krantz threshold model than by the curvilinear ROC implied by the signal-detection theory. (shrink)

Angry faces have been shown to be detected more efficiently in a crowd of distractors compared to happy faces, known as the anger superiority effect (ASE). The present study investigated whether the ASE could be modified by top-down manipulation of working memory (WM), in central and peripheral visual fields. In central vision, participants held a colour in WM for a final memory test while simultaneously performing a visual search task that required them to determine whether a face showed a different (...) expression from other coloured faces. The colour held in WM matched either the colour of the target face (target-matching), the colour of a distractor face (distractor-matching), or neither (non-matching). Results showed that the ASE was observed when the probability of target-matching trials was low. However, when the top-down WM effect was strengthened by raising the probability of target-matching trials, the ASE in the target-matching condition was completely eliminated. Intriguingly, when the visual search task was substituted by a peripheral crowding task, similar results to central vision were found in the target-matching condition. Taken together, our findings indicate that the ASE is subject to the top-down WM effect, regardless of the visual field. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe attentional blink is the impaired ability to detect a second target when it follows shortly after the first among distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation...

Contribution of emotional valence and arousal to attentional processing over time is not fully understood. We employed a rapid serial visual paradigm in three experiments to investigate the...