Cognitive control enables people to adjust their thoughts and actions according to the current task demands. Response inhibition and response adjustment are two key aspects of cognitive control. Here, we examined how the implicit processing of emotional information influences these two functions with the help of the double-step saccade task. Each trial had either a single target or two sequential targets. Upon a single target onset, participants were required to make a quick saccade, but upon two target onsets, participants were (...) instructed to inhibit their initial saccades and redirect their gaze to the second target. In three experiments, we manipulated the emotional information of the first and second targets. We found that irrelevant emotional information of the first target impaired response inhibition compared to non-emotional information (geometric shapes) of the first target. When non-emotional information (geometric shape) came as the first target, irrelevant angry emotional faces as the second target interfered with both response inhibition and response adjustment compared to irrelevant happy and neutral faces. We explain these results with previous findings that processing faces with irrelevant angry facial expressions take up many attentional resources, leaving fewer resources available for ongoing activities such as response inhibition and response adjustment. (shrink)

Threat-related stimuli can capture attention. However, it remains debated whether this capture is automatic or not. To address this question, we compared attentional biases to emotional faces using a dot-probe task (DPT) where emotion was never goal-relevant (Experiment 1) or made directly task-relevant by means of induction trials (Experiments 2–3). Moreover, the contingency between the DPT and induction trials was either partial (Experiment 2) or full (Experiment 3). Eye-tracking was used to ascertain that the emotional cue and the subsequent target (...) were processed with peripheral vision. Experiments 1 and 2 both showed that negative faces captured attention, with faster target processing when it appeared on the same side as the preceding fearful face (i.e. fear-valid trials) compared to the opposite side where the neutral face was shown (i.e. fear-invalid trials), but also when it appeared on the side of the preceding neutral face (i.e. happy-invalid trials) compared to the happy face (i.e. happy-valid trials). Importantly, this preferential spatial orienting to negative emotion was not observed in Experiment 3, where the goal relevance of emotion was high. However, in that experiment, fearful faces produced a specific attentional bias during the DPT, which was mostly driven by the induction trials themselves. (shrink)

Recently, researchers have expanded the investigation into attentional biases toward positive stimuli; however, few studies have examined attentional biases toward positive auditory information. In three experiments, the present study employed an emotional spatial cueing task using emotional sounds as cues and auditory stimuli or visual stimuli as targets to explore whether auditory or visual spatial attention could be modulated by positive auditory cues. Experiment 3 also examined the temporal dynamics of cross-modal auditory bias toward positive natural sounds using event-related potentials. (...) The behavioral results of the three experiments consistently demonstrated that response times to targets were faster after positive auditory cues than they were after neutral auditory cues in the valid condition, indicating that healthy participants showed a selective auditory attentional bias and cross-modal attentional bias toward positive natural sounds. The results of Experiment 3 showed that N1 amplitudes were more negative after positive sounds than they were after neutral sounds, which further provided electrophysiological evidence that positive auditory information enhances attention at early stages in healthy adults. The results of the experiments performed in the present study suggest that humans exhibit an attentional bias toward positive natural sounds. (shrink)

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1632-1645.