Interactions between attention and emotion: Visual attention prioritizes Chinese characters with negative connotations

• Main Authors: Wang, Yuan-Sheng, 王淵生
• Other Authors: Lo, Shih-Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5ja9k2

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 理學院應用科技學程 === 106 === Previous research has shown inconsistent emotional effects on perception. One line of research demonstrates facilitative and global effects, and the other line demonstrates inhibitive and location-specific effects of emotion on perception. To disentangle this controversy, the dual-stream rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, based on the theoretical framework of parallel activation and sequential tokenization model (Goodbourn and Holcombe, 2015), was used in this thesis. Participants were presented with two streams of RSVP composed of Chinese characters with neutral or negative connotations. For each stream, a ring surrounding the character steam was briefly presented. The task was to identify the target that was presented with the ring cue. The participants had a tendency to report an item slightly later than the ring, which was termed as “selection latency”. In addition, the participants made random guessing responses in some trials, and “selection efficacy” was defined by the proportion of trials where the participant did not guess. A mixture model, which could separately estimate selection latency and efficacy, was used to fit the data. The fitting results suggest that the role of emotion were two-fold: Firstly, the presence of negatively charged targets accelerates attention selection, evidenced by a reduction of selection latency as long as the targets contained at least one negative stream. Secondly, negatively charged characters preoccupied attentional resources for consolidation, evidenced by higher efficacy for negatively charged characters, and lower efficacy for characters that were presented with negatively charged neighbors.