Emotional modulation of statistical learning in visual search

Zinchenko, Artyom; Bierlich, Afton M.; Conci, Markus; Müller, Hermann J.; Geyer, Thomas · 2024 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3389/fcogn.2024.1404112

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Summary

This study investigates how emotional stimuli influence statistical learning during visual search, specifically examining the "contextual cueing" effect. Contextual cueing refers to the incidental learning of spatial relationships between targets and distractors, which facilitates faster detection of targets in repeated display arrangements. While negative emotional stimuli are known to capture attention and potentially impair task performance, their impact on this automatic learning process remains controversial. The authors sought to determine whether transient emotional alerts induced by faces or scenes prior to a search task enhance or diminish contextual learning, and whether this effect depends on the type of emotional stimulus. The researchers conducted an experiment with 46 participants divided into two groups: one viewing emotional or neutral faces (from the NimStim database) and the other viewing emotional or neutral scenes (from the International Affective Picture System). In each trial, participants were presented with an emotional or neutral image for 500 ms, followed by a variable interval (50, 500, or 1,000 ms) before a visual search task. The search task required identifying the orientation of a T-shaped target among L-shaped distractors. Half of the trials featured repeated spatial layouts, while the other half had random layouts. Reaction times were measured to assess the magnitude of contextual cueing, defined as the difference in speed between repeated and non-repeated displays. The results revealed a significant dissociation between the effects of emotional faces and emotional scenes. For participants viewing scenes, contextual cueing was significantly enhanced when preceded by negative emotional scenes compared to neutral scenes, where no cueing effect was observed. This enhancement occurred regardless of the time interval between the emotional stimulus and the search display. Conversely, for participants viewing faces, emotional stimuli did not modulate the cueing effect; in fact, the cueing effect was numerically smaller for emotional faces than for neutral faces, though both conditions showed reliable learning. Exploratory analyses confirmed that these differences were not due to variations in arousal or valence ratings, nor to the specific discrete emotions elicited (e.g., disgust), as the pattern held even when comparing identical emotional content across stimulus types. The authors conclude that emotional scenes facilitate automatic contextual learning by withdrawing attentional resources from the primary search task, thereby biasing participants toward a more passive, receptive search strategy. This passive engagement allows for stronger incidental learning of spatial regularities. In contrast, emotional faces, which are processed more rapidly and may engage attention differently, do not produce this beneficial interference effect. These findings suggest that the impact of emotion on statistical learning is not uniform but depends critically on the nature of the emotional stimulus and its ability to alter the strategic deployment of attention during visual search.

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• visual search