情绪性注意瞬脱的认知机制:来自行为与ERP的证据

Cognitive mechanisms of the emotional attentional blink: Evidence from behavior and ERPs

从过度投入理论与激活反弹理论对瓶颈理论的质疑出发,采用ERP技术检验了情绪性注意瞬脱的加工过程及其神经机制。行为结果显示,以恐惧面孔为T1,中性场景图片为T2,则恐惧面孔T1相对中性面孔T1显著降低了中性T2的识别正确率,进而诱发了情绪性注意瞬脱。ERP结果进一步显示,相较于中性面孔T1,恐惧面孔T1诱发的情绪加工影响了代表中枢加工资源的两阶段P3波幅,使得其始终高于代表标准注意瞬脱的中性面孔T1条件和代表非注意瞬脱的单任务基线条件。以上结果证明,情绪性注意瞬脱形成自情绪性T1加工所诱发的中枢资源过度投入,而非源自中枢资源瓶颈。

The emotional attentional blink（EAB） refers to a specific limitation of humans＇ attention system that consciously perception ability of target stimuli distributed across time is reduced by emotional/affective processes. Under conditions of rapid serial visual presentation（RSVP）, participants usually display a significant reduced ability to report the second of two targets（T2） in a stream of distractors if it appears within 200-500 msec following the first target（T1）. This effect is known as attentional blink（AB）. However, when emotional/ affective stimulus is used as T1 and T2 is neutral, the AB effect can be strengthened. This specific effect of attentional blink is emotional attentional blink（EAB）. Compared with the standard AB effect, the EAB has its unique characteristics. For example, the stimulus onset asynchrony（SOA） between T1 and T2 in EAB could be less than that in standard attentional blink（e.g., ≤134 msec; Stein et al., 2009）. Nevertheless, the task of T1 recognition should be aimed at the dimension of emotional process.Although recent behavior studies have provided much evidence about the process of EAB, details about the cognitive neural mechanisms of EAB are still unknown. Therefore, this research aimed to examine the cognitive neural processing mechanisms of the EAB and verify the divergences between views of the Bottleneck Theory（Martens Wyble, 2010; Zhang Wang, 2009） and the Overinvestment theory（as well as the Boost and Bounce Theory; Olivers Meeter, 2008; Olivers Nieuwenhuis, 2006）. To achieve this purpose, the present study employed a modified dual-task RSVP paradigm referred from the Study 1 of Stein et al.（2009）. Moreover, the technology of event related potentials（ERPs） was used to examine the fast neural process of the EAB. In this RSVP stream, emotional faces（three conditions： fear faces, neutral faces, and face absent） were used as T1, and pictures of house scene（neutral： outdoor vs. indoor） were used as T2 stimuli. Participants were instructed to recognize T1 and T2 when the visual stream was presented. Once the visual stream disappeared, participants had to make judgment of T1 and T2 based on their categories or features. Meanwhile, EEG/ERPs from the facial recognition of T1 to the scene recognition of T2 were recorded and off-line analyzed. The results of the final behavioral data analysis revealed that the condition of emotion T1（fear faces） led to a significant reduction in the efficiency of T2 recognition, which was much lower than that in the conditions of neutral T1（neutral faces） and T1 missing. These behavioral results indicated a typical EAB effect. In addition, the ERPs results provided the first evidence for the process of the EAB. In this research, we focused on the P3 components of the two processing stages of T1 and T2, respectively. Because these P3 components indexed the resource of attention in central processing. The final results showed that compared with other stimuli conditions（neutral T1 and T1 absent）, the P3 amplitudes evoked by emotion T1 and T2 presentation were both enhanced. This effect should deny the resource bottleneck between the T1 and T2 competition but support the emotional/affective overinvestment in EAB. Based on these results, the neural mechanisms of EAB were discussed.