People seem to differ in their visual search performance involving emotionally expressive faces when these expressions are seen on faces of others close to their age compared to faces of non-peers, known as the own-age bias. This study sought to compare search advantages in angry and happy faces detected on faces of adults and children on a pool of children and adults. The goals of this study were to examine the developmental trajectory of expression recognition and examine the development of (...) an OAB. Participants were asked to find a target face displaying an emotional expression among eight neutral faces. Results showed that children and adults found happy faces significantly faster than angry and fearful faces regardless of it being present on the faces of peers or non-peers. Adults responded faster to the faces of peers regardless of the expression. Furthermore, while children detected angry faces significantly faster compared to fearful ones, we found no such difference in adults. In contrast, adults detected all expressions significantly faster when they appeared on the faces of other adults compared to the faces of children. In sum, we found evidence for development in detecting facial expressions and also an age-dependent increase in OAB. We suggest that the happy face could have an advantage in visual processing due to its importance in social situations and its overall higher frequency compared to other emotional expressions. Although we only found some evidence on the OAB, using peer or non-peer faces should be a theoretical consideration of future research because the same emotion displayed on non-peers’ compared to peers’ faces may have different implications and meanings to the perceiver. (shrink)

In higher-level cognitive tasks, older compared to younger adults show a bias towards positive emotion information and away from negative information (a positivity effect). It is unclear whether this effect occurs in early perceptual processing. This issue is important for determining if the positivity effect is due to automatic rather than controlled processing. We tested this with older and younger adults on a positive/negative face emotion valence classification task using masked priming. Positive (happy) and negative (angry) face targets were preceded (...) by masked repetition or valence primes with neutral face baselines. In Experiment 1, 30 younger and 30 older adults were tested with 50 ms primes. Younger adults showed repetition priming for both positive and negative targets. Older adults showed repetition priming for positive but not negative targets. Neither group showed valence priming. In Experiment 2, 30 older and 29 younger adults were tested with longer duration primes. Younger adults showed repetition priming for both positive and negative emotions, and no valence priming. Older adults only showed repetition and valence priming for positive targets. We proposed older adults’ lack of angry face priming was due to an early attention orienting strategy favouring happy expressions at the expense of angry ones. (shrink)

RésuméLes philosophes et les scientifiques présument en général que la conscience est caractérisée par « un point de vue à la première personne ». Selon une interprétation de cette revendication, les expériences sont définies, au moins en partie, par des représentations qui encodent un « point de vue » centré sur le sujet. Par contre, les revendications sur les caractéristiques déterminantes de la conscience doivent être attentives à la possibilité d'une dissociation : si une structure neurobiologique ou une fonction psychologique (...) n'est pas nécessaire ni suffisante pour la conscience, elle ne peut pas être un attribut distinctif dans un sens robuste. Je fais appel à la recherche sur l’émotion inconsciente, l'action guidée par la perception, la constance perceptuelle et les troubles psychiques pour soutenir que les représentations à la première personne dissocient de l'expérience consciente. (shrink)

The evaluative priming paradigm aims to uncover the processes underlying evaluations. For this purpose, this paradigm presents a sequence of two or more stimuli varying on the valence dimension to which participants must provide a response. The “standard” evaluative priming effect is a relative facilitation of the required responses in congruent trials compared to incongruent trials. The following thesis argues that this evaluative priming effect depends on prime-target similarity, with higher similarity between prime and target leading to larger priming effects. (...) Part one of this thesis presents a meta-analysis of existing data, which tests evidence for the impact of similarity on evaluative priming effects. This reanalysis is based on the assumption that positive information is overall more similar to other positive information than negative information is to other negative information. Thus, this analysis compares effects of positive and negative prime-target pairs. The results confirm that positive prime-target pairs elicit stronger priming effects than negative prime-target pairs. This analysis involves a broad sample of stimuli and designs which supports the generalizability of this finding. However, the results are also in line with alternative interpretations attributing the valence asymmetries to other effects caused by valence. The following four experiments manipulate similarity either by selecting prime-target pairs based on pre-ratings or by presenting identical and non-identical prime-target pairs. All four experiments show that similar prime-target pairs create larger priming effects than dissimilar prime-target pairs. These findings have implications for our understanding of the evaluative priming paradigm, the use of evaluative priming as a measure of attitudes, and the conceptualization of the evaluative system. These implications will be discussed. (shrink)