Abstract
The current study examined whether emotional expectations gate attention to emotional words in early visual cortex. Color cues informed about word valence and onset latency. We observed a stimulus-preceding negativity prior to the onset of cued words that was larger for negative than for neutral words. This indicates that in anticipation of emotional words more attention was allocated to them than to neutral words before target onset. During stimulus presentation the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), elicited by flickering words, was attenuated for cued compared to uncued words, indicating sharpened sensory activity, i.e., expectation suppression. Most importantly, the SSVEP was more enhanced for negative than neutral words when these were cued. Uncued conditions did not differ in SSVEP amplitudes, paralleling previous studies reporting lexico-semantic but not early visual effects of emotional words. We suggest that cueing mediates re-entrant engagement of visual resources by providing an early “affective gist” of an upcoming word. Consequently, visual single-word studies may have underestimated attentional effects of emotional words and their anticipation during reading.
Highlights
Emotional signals influence perception and behavior as well as their underlying neural activity (Vuilleumier, 2005; Lang and Bradley, 2009)
In line with our hypothesis that an emotional “gist” provided by a valence cue can gate an emotion effect in occipital cortex, we report a more enhanced State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) amplitude in response to negative than neutral words in the cued but not in the uncued conditions
A subtle color cue was sufficient to set off anticipation of emotional word content indexed by the Stimulus-Preceding Negativity (SPN) amplitude modulation
Summary
Emotional signals influence perception and behavior as well as their underlying neural activity (Vuilleumier, 2005; Lang and Bradley, 2009) It is less clear where along the visual stream emotional salience amplifies processing and whether this differs for symbolic (e.g., words) or naturalistic (e.g., faces) stimuli. While emotional scenes and faces have robustly captured visual attention in fMRI (Lang et al, 1998; Bradley et al, 2003; Vuilleumier and Huang, 2009; Hindi Attar et al, 2010b) and ERP studies (Doallo et al, 2006; Pourtois and Vuilleumier, 2006), there is rather mixed evidence regarding emotional words (Keil, 2006; Frühholz et al, 2011). Its amplitude is robustly modulated by spatial attention
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
