The effect of fearful faces on the attentional blink is modulated by emotional task relevance: An event-related potential study

Abstract

A fearful face as second visual target (T2) was detected better than a neutral T2 in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task. The advantage of fear over neutral emotion was originally attributed to a limited-capacity mechanism, in which fearful stimuli are prioritized for attention over neutral stimuli. However, more recent studies have shown that the prioritization of the processing of fear is strongly dependent on the emotional task relevance. Combining the RSVP task and Garner's paradigm, by varying the expression (fearful and neutral faces) and the emotional task relevance of the T2 (relevance: emotion classification task; irrelevance: gender classification task), this study aims to investigate the role of emotional task relevance on the advantage of fear during an RSVP task in which participants have to identify two visual targets in a stream of distractors. The behavioral results revealed that there was no significant effect of the expression on the task performance in the gender classification task. Fearful faces were easier to detect than neutral faces, but the T2 accuracy of fearful faces was lower than that of neutral faces in the emotion classification task. Furthermore, we found that the vertex positive potential and P100 components were enhanced for fearful faces compared to neutral faces independent of the emotional task relevance. For the P300 component, there was no significant difference in the gender classification task, but fearful faces elicited enhanced P300 amplitudes compared to neutral faces in the emotion classification task. These results indicated that the early processing of fear is automatic, while the late processing of fear is dependent on the emotional task relevance under limited attentional resources.