Dual-Task Interference on Early and Late Stages of Facial Emotion Detection Is Revealed by Human Electrophysiology

Roberge, Amélie; Roberge, Amélie; Duncan, Justin; Duncan, Justin; Fiset, Daniel; Brisson, Benoit · 2019 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00391

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Summary

This study investigates whether the processing of facial emotions is truly automatic or dependent on central attentional resources. While evolutionary theories suggest that rapid detection of social threats, such as fearful expressions, occurs automatically, recent evidence implies that this processing may require cognitive resources. To resolve this debate, the authors utilized a psychological refractory period (PRP) dual-task paradigm to manipulate central attention scarcity and measured its impact on specific event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with emotional face processing. The experimental design involved 27 participants performing two concurrent tasks: an auditory tone categorization task (Task 1) and a visual facial expression discrimination task (Task 2), where participants identified whether faces were neutral or fearful. The degree of central processing overlap was manipulated by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two tasks at 300 ms (high overlap), 650 ms (moderate overlap), and 1,000 ms (low overlap). The researchers analyzed four ERP components linked to distinct stages of emotion processing: the early posterior negativity (EPN, perceptual encoding), early frontal positivity (EFP, emotion detection), late positive potential (LPP, content evaluation), and the face-sensitive N170 (structural encoding). The results demonstrated that central resource scarcity significantly attenuated emotion-specific ERP responses for three of the four components. Specifically, the emotional modulation of the EFP and LPP was statistically nullified under conditions of maximal central overlap (300 ms SOA). The EPN response was also significantly reduced at short SOAs, becoming only marginally different from zero. In contrast, the N170 amplitude remained unaffected by task overlap, indicating that early structural encoding of faces is resilient to central attention demands. Behavioral data confirmed the PRP effect, with slower reaction times for Task 2 at shorter SOAs, and revealed that accurate detection of fearful faces was impaired under high cognitive load. These findings challenge models that assume fully automatic processing of facial emotions. The study concludes that while early structural encoding (N170) may be automatic, subsequent stages of emotional processing—including perceptual encoding, emotion detection, and content evaluation—require central attentional resources. Consequently, when central resources are monopolized by a concurrent task, the neural signatures of emotional processing are attenuated or eliminated. This suggests that theories of emotion perception must be revised to account for the dependency of these processes on available cognitive capacity.

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• dual task multitasking