Abstract
In picture viewing, emotional vs. neutral stimuli could play a different role in eye movement parameters and in the spatial progression of the scanpath. The aim of this paper is to investigate exploratory behaviour of normal subjects during the vision of emotional vs. non-emotional stimuli, by considering to what extent the thematic content (animate vs. inanimate) is likely to influence the observer’s eye movements. Sixty-five subjects’ eye movement patterns were measured while looking to emotional (pleasant and unpleasant) and neutral pictures depicting animate or inanimate contents. Results showed that the number of fixations and the gaze duration were greater for emotional pictures than for neutral ones, and animate pictures were fixated longer than inanimate ones. Both emotional and animate pictures may affect eye movements and constitute privileged stimuli of adaptive behavioural tendencies.
Highlights
In order to provide further evidences in favour of this hypothesis, the aim of this paper is to investigate exploratory behaviour of normal subjects during the vision of emotional vs. non-emotional stimuli characterized by different thematic content in order to highlight the factors likely to influence the observer’s eye movements
Number of fixations - The histogram in Figure 2 compares the mean number of fixations for animate vs. inanimate pictures within each valence category
The results so far described illustrate the exploratory behaviour of normal subjects during the vision of affective or neutral pictures
Summary
Research on emotional processing suggests that stimuli endowed with emotional valence, compared to neutral ones, have a privileged early and automatic access to analysis by the cognitive system, which is biased to preferentially process stimuli that have a special adaptive importance (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1990; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997). This seems to entail that, when a neutral picture is paired with an emotionally valenced (unpleasant and pleasant) picture, the pattern of subjects’ eye movements should be influenced by the emotional one. Anxious subjects are likely to dwell more on unpleasant pictures (Mogg & Bradley, 1998) and depressed subjects tend to spend significantly more time on unpleasant images compared to pleasant
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
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
