Top-Down and Bottom-Up Attention in Visual Search of Emotional Faces in Aging

• Main Authors: Lee, Ai Ru, 李璦如
• Other Authors: Huang, Shwu Lih
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/14241487716827012504

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 心理學研究所 === 99 === This research is aim to understand attention in visual search of emotional faces in aging. Two types of attention process, that is top-down and bottom-up attention, were concerned in this study. In past researches, there are empirical evidences showing age-related declination in attention function, especially in bottom-up attention. But top-down attention is still playing an important role in doing task for the older adults. In order to understand the effect of top-down attention in aging, two experiments using endogenous or exogenous spatial cues were designed. Participants have to respond whether there is a different emotional face or not in a visual search task. The independent variables are age（aging and young）, emotional face（happy and angry）, and cue（valid, neutral, and invalid）. Dependent variables are reaction times and accuracy. In Experiment 1, there are two stages: 80％ valid endogenous cues and 25％ valid exogenous cues. The endogenous cues stage and exogenous cues stage were designed to probe top-down attention and bottom-up attention, respectively. In Experiment 2, there are two stages: 80％ valid exogenous cues（highly informative cues）and 25％ valid exogenous cues（non-informative cues）. Using highly informative exogenous cues involve both top-down and bottom-up attention. In contrast, non-informative exogenous cues only trigger bottom-up attention. The major results of this study support threat advantage hypothesis that both older and young adults respond to angry face target quicker than happy face. Benefit from top-down attention was larger in older adults than young adults. Highly informative cues help older adults more in searching emotional faces than young adults. The cuing effects in two emotional face conditions were different between Experiment 1 and 2. This inconsistent result maybe relates to aging heterogeneity. In conclusion, top-down attention can help older adults search for emotional faces.