Electrophysiological evidence of emotion perception without central attention

Abstract

The present study examined whether emotion perception requires central attentional resources. Specifically, we used a dual-task paradigm to examine whether people can direct their attention to a face expressing a target emotion even while they are still busy selecting a response to another task. Task 1 required an auditory discrimination (pure tone vs. noise). For Task 2, one happy face and one angry face were presented adjacent to each other. Participants were asked to find the face with a prespecified emotion and indicate its gender (Experiment 1) or location (Experiment 2). The stimulus–onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two tasks was varied. To determine where people were attending, we used an electrophysiological measure of attention known as the N2pc component of the event-related brain potential. The face expressing the target emotion elicited an N2pc effect, indicating attention capture, even when participants were already preoccupied with processing Task 1 (i.e., short SOAs). Thus, it appears that emotion perception can occur even when central attentional resources are unavailable. We also obtained evidence of an attentional bias towards angry faces rather than happy faces.