Attention and early stages of emotional expression processing: study with ERP and LORETA

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Attention and early stages of emotional expression processing: study with ERP and LORETA Eligiusz Wronka1* and W. Walentowska1 1 Department of Psychophysiology, Jagiellonian University, Poland Recent Event-Related Potential (ERP) studies revealed that selective brain responses to emotional faces can be observed at very short latencies, as early as 120 to 180 ms post-stimulus in different experiments. This effect was found to disappear if attention was directed away from the location of peripherally presented emotional faces suggesting that processing of facial expression strongly depend on spatial attention. However, it is not clear if similar differentiation could be observed when attention is not spatially manipulated. We recorded ERP responses to foveally presented photographs of angry, happy, or neutral faces. We found that emotional expression influences brain activity indexed by N170 component when attention was engaged in classification of facial expression. Such effect was not observed when the task was to recognize gender of faces. Additionally, we localize the sources of brain activity underlying the above mentioned differences using the Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA). We found that emotional expression effect obtained for face expression task can be related to differential activation within middle and superior temporal gyri. Similar effect for face gender task was not observed. Our results support the hypothesis that structural encoding and expression analysis are independent processes and that in both cases attention importantly modulates the processing. This work was supported by a grant to Eligiusz Wronka from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education – N N106 1958 33. Conference: 10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Turkey, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Emotional Processing Citation: Wronka E and Walentowska W (2008). Attention and early stages of emotional expression processing: study with ERP and LORETA. Conference Abstract: 10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.234 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 09 Dec 2008; Published Online: 09 Dec 2008. * Correspondence: Eligiusz Wronka, Department of Psychophysiology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, eligiusz.wronka@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Eligiusz Wronka W. Walentowska Google Eligiusz Wronka W. Walentowska Google Scholar Eligiusz Wronka W. Walentowska PubMed Eligiusz Wronka W. Walentowska Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.