Explicit attention interferes with selective emotion processing in human extrastriate cortex

Schupp, Harald T.; Stockburger, Jessica; Bublatzky, Florian; Junghöfer, Markus; Weike, Almut I.; Hamm, Alfons O. · 2007 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1186/1471-2202-8-16

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Summary

This study investigates whether the early, selective processing of emotional stimuli in the human visual cortex is an automatic, effortless process or if it is subject to interference when cognitive resources are taxed by competing attentional demands. Previous research established that emotional stimuli (pleasant and unpleasant) elicit an enhanced Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) event-related potential (ERP) component (~150–300 ms post-stimulus) compared to neutral stimuli, suggesting rapid emotional discrimination. The authors sought to determine if this modulation persists under high processing loads, specifically testing the "interference account" against the notion of "effortlessness." To test this, participants viewed a rapid stream of images from the International Affective Picture Series (IAPS) while performing a concurrent feature-based counting task. The task demand was manipulated by varying the probability of task-relevant stimuli (images overlaid with thin vertical or horizontal lines) across four conditions: 0% (passive viewing), 10%, 50%, and 100%. Participants were instructed to silently count rare target orientations. Behavioral performance and ERP markers of selective attention (Selection Negativity and P3b) confirmed that participants successfully engaged in the counting task, with subjective difficulty ratings increasing significantly in the 50% and 100% conditions compared to the lower-demand conditions. The results demonstrated that the emotional modulation of the EPN was highly dependent on task demand. In the low-demand conditions (0% and 10%), pleasant and unpleasant images elicited significantly larger EPN amplitudes than neutral images, replicating previous findings. However, in the high-demand conditions (50% and 100%), this emotional differentiation was abolished; pleasant and unpleasant pictures failed to elicit increased EPN amplitudes compared to neutral images. This interference effect persisted even when analyses were restricted to trials without superimposed lines, ruling out perceptual masking as the cause. Furthermore, even highly arousing emotional stimuli, which typically capture attention robustly, showed markedly attenuated EPN modulation under high task load, although a small residual effect remained. Source localization indicated that the neural generators in occipito-temporo-parietal regions were less active for emotional stimuli during high-demand tasks. The findings conclude that early selective emotion processing is not effortless but competes for limited processing resources with explicit attentional tasks. The study supports an interference account of emotion-attention interaction, demonstrating that taxing perceptual and working memory resources attenuates the neural signature of emotional discrimination. These results challenge the view that emotional processing is automatic in the sense of being resource-independent, suggesting instead that automaticity should be assessed as a multidimensional construct rather than an all-or-none phenomenon.

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Topics

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• affect cognition
• dual task performance