Abstract
Visual attention is the process that enables us to select relevant visual stimuli in our environment to achieve a goal or perform adaptive behaviors. In this process, bottom-up mechanisms interact with top-down mechanisms underlying the automatic and voluntary orienting of attention. Cognitive functions, such as emotional processing, can influence visual attention by increasing or decreasing the resources destined for processing stimuli. The relationship between attention and emotion has been explored mainly in the field of automatic attentional capturing; especially, emotional stimuli are suddenly presented and detection rates or reaction times are recorded. Unlike these paradigms, natural visual scenes may be comprised in multiple stimuli with different emotional valences. In this setting, the mechanisms supporting voluntary visual orientation, under the influence of the emotional components of stimuli, are unknown. We employed a mosaic of pictures with different emotional valences (positive, negative, and neutral) and explored the dynamics of attentional visual orientation, assessed by eye tracking and measurements of pupil diameter. We found that pictures with affective content display increased dwelling times when compared to neutral pictures with a larger effect for negative pictures. The valence, regardless of the arousal levels, was the main factor driving the behavioral modulation of visual orientation. On the other hand, the visual exploration was accompanied by a systematic pupillary response, with the pupil contraction and dilation influenced by the arousal levels, with minor effects driven by the valence. Our results emphasize that arousal and valence should be considered different dimensions of emotional processing both interacting with cognitive processes such as visual attention.
Highlights
In vision as well as in other sensory modalities, our capacity to process stimuli is limited
For the dilation phase we found that the maximum and delta of dilation depended on the arousal exclusively [maximum dilation (MD) F(1,104) = 32.2, p < 0.001; DD F(1,104) = 15.3, p < 0.001], while the speed of dilation depended on the arousal [SD F(1,104) = 6.28, p = 0.014] and on the interaction between valence and arousal [SD F(1,104) = 7.1, p = 0.009], and latency of dilation on the interaction [LD F(1,104) = 4, p = 0.048]
We investigated the influence of the emotional component over the visual attentional process
Summary
In vision as well as in other sensory modalities, our capacity to process stimuli is limited. One mechanism of attentional capture emphasizes an exogenous process, referring to the automatic drive triggered by highly salient stimuli in a bottomup fashion. Emotional Modulation During Free Viewing model states that it is the interaction of bottom-up afferences entering our visual field with top-down cognitive efferences that gives efficiency to the process of visual attention (Desimone and Ducan, 1995). For both mechanisms, different neural networks have been identified (for a review, see Corbetta et al, 2008). The fact that the eyes fixate where the attention is located unless a voluntary effort is done to avoid such response makes the ocular behavior a frequent marker of visual attention (Krauzlis et al, 2013)
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