Abstract
Past attempts to characterize the neural mechanisms of affective priming have conceptualized it in terms of classic cognitive conflict, but have not examined the neural oscillatory mechanisms of subliminal affective priming. Using behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG) time frequency (TF) analysis, the current study examines the oscillatory dynamics of unconsciously triggered conflict in an emotional facial expressions version of the masked affective priming task. The results demonstrate that the power dynamics of conflict are characterized by increased midfrontal theta activity and suppressed parieto-occipital alpha activity. Across-subject and within-trial correlation analyses further confirmed this pattern. Phase synchrony and Granger causality analyses (GCAs) revealed that the fronto-parietal network was involved in unconscious conflict detection and resolution. Our findings support a response conflict account of affective priming, and reveal the role of the fronto-parietal network in unconscious conflict control.
Highlights
Using Spearman rank correlations, we examined the association between the conflict effect (Incongruent-congruent) in reaction times (RTs) and power averaged across trials
The ANOVA results showed that theta-band directed synchrony in incongruent trials was stronger than in congruent trials (F(1,21) = 10.40, p = 0.004), and theta-band directed synchrony in medial frontal cortex (MFC)→posterior parietal cortex (PPC) was significantly stronger than in PPC→MFC (F(1,21) = 11.23, p = 0.003)
Further analyses showed that the conflict effect (Incongruentcongruent, M = 0.01, t = 3.16, p = 0.005) on MFC→PPC theta-band directed synchrony was statistically significant, while conflict on PPC→MFC theta-band directed synchrony was not significant (M = 0.00, t = 0.50, p = 0.619)
Summary
Numerous studies over the past several years have revealed that automatically evaluated affective information has a substantial impact on subsequent decision and judgment (Fazio et al, 1986; Murphy and Zajonc, 1993; Klauer and Musch, 2003; Dannlowski and Suslow, 2006; Frings and Wentura, 2008; Li et al, 2008; Bartholow et al, 2009; Gibbons, 2009; Jiang et al, 2013; Kiefer et al, 2017). The affective congruency effect is still present even though the primes are not consciously perceived by participants due to their brief duration and masking (e.g., Murphy and Zajonc, 1993; Greenwald et al, 1996; Dannlowski and Suslow, 2006; Li et al, 2008; Gibbons, 2009; Jiang et al, 2013; Kiefer et al, 2017). The occurrence of a subliminal affective congruency effect suggests that the unconsciously processed affective information can modulate ongoing evaluation and judgments even if this information is outside conscious awareness (for a review, see Klauer and Musch, 2003).
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