Abstract
Exogenous or automatic attention to emotional distractors has been observed for emotional scenes and faces. In the language domain, however, automatic attention capture by emotional words has been scarcely investigated. In the current event-related potentials study we explored distractor effects elicited by positive, negative and neutral words in a concurrent but distinct target distractor paradigm. Specifically, participants performed a digit categorization task in which task-irrelevant words were flanked by numbers. The results of both temporo-spatial principal component and source location analyses revealed the existence of early distractor effects that were specifically triggered by positive words. At the scalp level, task-irrelevant positive compared to neutral and negative words elicited larger amplitudes in an anterior negative component that peaked around 120 ms. Also, at the voxel level, positive distractor words increased activity in orbitofrontal regions compared to negative words. These results suggest that positive distractor words quickly and automatically capture attentional resources diverting them from the task where attention was voluntarily directed.
Highlights
In order to maintain coherent behavior in a continuously changing environment, attentional processes are controlled endogenously to allow for keeping goal-directed behaviors in spite of distracting events
As a consequence of the application of the temporal principal component analysis (tPCA), several temporal factors (TFs) were extracted from the event-related potential (ERP)
SOURCE LOCALIZATION RESULTS The last analytic step consisted of three-dimensionally localizing the cortical regions that were responsible for the differences observed in the anterior N1
Summary
In order to maintain coherent behavior in a continuously changing environment, attentional processes are controlled endogenously to allow for keeping goal-directed behaviors in spite of distracting events. The mechanism that is able to detect the appearance of these new events is called exogenous attention ( referred to as bottom-up, involuntary or stimulus-driven attention). It may be described as an adaptive mechanism for the rapid detection and processing of biologically relevant events, even when individuals are engaged in a resource-consuming task (Carretié, 2014). According to different theoretical views (see Yantis, 2000 for a review), exogenous attention involves several processes such as the spatial automatic orientation of processing resources toward those events that deserve further processing (Sokolov, 1963; Graham and Hackley, 1991; Corbetta and Shulman, 2002; Posner et al, 2007), or the modulation of perceptual neural mechanisms that potentiate the processing of those stimuli capturing attention (Serences and Yantis, 2007; Asplund et al, 2010)
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
