Abstract
To explore whether the meaning of a word changes visual processing of emotional faces (i.e., visual awareness and visual attention), we performed two complementary studies. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with emotion and control words and then tracked their visual awareness for two competing emotional faces using a binocular rivalry paradigm. Participants experienced the emotional face congruent with the emotion word for longer than a word-incongruent emotional face, as would be expected if the word was biasing awareness toward the (unseen) face. In Experiment 2, we similarly presented participants with emotion and control words prior to presenting emotional faces using a divided visual field paradigm. Emotion words were congruent with either the emotional face in the right or left visual field. After the presentation of faces, participants saw a dot in either the left or right visual field. Participants were slower to identify the location of the dot when it appeared in the same visual field as the emotional face congruent with the emotion word. The effect was limited to the left hemisphere (RVF), as would be expected for linguistic integration of the word with the face. Since the task was not linguistic, but rather a simple dot-probe task, participants were slower in their responses under these conditions because they likely had to disengage from the additional linguistic processing caused by the word-face integration. These findings indicate that emotion words bias visual awareness for congruent emotional faces, as well as shift attention toward congruent emotional faces.
Highlights
In everyday life, people use words to communicate what they see in the world around them, usually without considering that those same words might be shaping what they see
We found a main effect of prime type, F(1,56) = 6.722, p = 0.006, one-tailed (Emotion word: M = 0.514, SE = 0.008; C.I. = 0.497–0.531) (Control word: M = 0.491, SE = 0.002; C.I. = 0.487–0.495), ηp2 = 0.107, Power = 0.722
Our results are the first to show that emotion words serve as an important top–down influence on visual awareness (Experiment 1) and selective visual attention (Experiment 2) of emotional faces
Summary
People use words to communicate what they see in the world around them, usually without considering that those same words might be shaping what they see. When two scowling faces were shown side-by-side and participants were satiated on the word “anger” (matching the content of the faces), participants were slower and less accurate to determine the pair matched in emotional content compared to when the word “anger” was primed In another experiment using a similar semantic satiation manipulation, participants saw an emotional face and were asked to encode it. In a similar study (Doyle and Lindquist, 2018), participants showed greater perceptual memory biases toward learned (rather than target) affective faces when the faces were encoded with nonsense words. Even for familiar emotion categories (e.g., “anger”), participants who learned novel exemplars were more likely to indicate the learned face than an actual target face as long as that learned face was encoded with a word These findings are consistent with early visual processing effects of words on perception, yet they do not test these effects directly. Some researchers have argued that perceptual memory tasks reflect reporting biases and have little to do with actual perception (see Firestone and Scholl, 2014)
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