Emotional content influences eye-movements under natural but not under instructed conditions

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Louisa Kulke ◽  
Laura Pasqualette
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Kulke ◽  
Lena Brümmer ◽  
Arezoo Pooresmaeili ◽  
Annekathrin Schacht

In everyday life, faces with emotional expressions quickly attract attention and eye-movements. To study the neural mechanisms of such emotion-driven attention by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), tasks that employ covert shifts of attention are commonly used, in which participants need to inhibit natural eye-movements towards stimuli. It remains, however, unclear how shifts of attention to emotional faces with and without eye-movements differ from each other. The current preregistered study aimed to investigate neural differences between covert and overt emotion-driven attention. We combined eye-tracking with measurements of ERPs to compare shifts of attention to faces with happy, angry or neutral expressions when eye-movements were either executed (Go conditions) or withheld (No-go conditions). Happy and angry faces led to larger EPN amplitudes, shorter latencies of the P1 component and faster saccades, suggesting that emotional expressions significantly affected shifts of attention. Several ERPs (N170, EPN, LPC), were augmented in amplitude when attention was shifted with an eye-movement, indicating an enhanced neural processing of faces if eye-movements had to be executed together with a reallocation of attention. However, the modulation of ERPs by facial expressions did not differ between the Go and No-go conditions, suggesting that emotional content enhances both covert and overt shifts of attention. In summary, our results indicate that overt and covert attention shifts differ but are comparably affected by emotional content.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Joseph Phillips

<p>The anti-saccade paradigm has been a favourite among researchers of attention and the control of eye movements. Most pro/anti-saccade studies have utilized meaningless stimuli, though stimulus meaning is known to have an impact on looking behaviour in free viewing conditions. Here, we explore the role of content in the control of pro/antisaccades by contrasting two alternative views on the impact of emotional stimuli. One view supports an "informativeness" hypothesis, where visual processing is directed towards threatening stimuli, suggesting that RT should be particularly large for negative, high arousal pictures in an antisaccade task. An alternative view emphasizes approach and withdrawal behaviours. Here negative images are thought to encourage avoidance behaviours, causing faster RTs for antisaccades; whereas positive pictures encourage approach behaviours, causing faster RTs for prosaccades. Participants performed an antisaccade task in which they were presented with an image to the left or right visual field and instructed to look at or away from the image. The experimental design included five groups of images, with a factorial combination of valence (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low), and a neutral condition. In Experiments one and two the instruction was given 200 ms before the picture was presented and did not produce any effects of emotional content. Thus, if participants are given advanced notice of the upcoming saccade, the initiation of that saccade is not influenced by the emotional content of the target image. In experiments three and four, the cue was presented 200 ms after the onset of the target image. This change of SOA provided an effect of emotional content was observed in experiments three and four which was illustrated by slowed RTs for both pro- and anti-saccades. However erotic images appeared to slow down latencies across both saccades which were accompanied by high error rates.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Joseph Phillips

<p>The anti-saccade paradigm has been a favourite among researchers of attention and the control of eye movements. Most pro/anti-saccade studies have utilized meaningless stimuli, though stimulus meaning is known to have an impact on looking behaviour in free viewing conditions. Here, we explore the role of content in the control of pro/antisaccades by contrasting two alternative views on the impact of emotional stimuli. One view supports an "informativeness" hypothesis, where visual processing is directed towards threatening stimuli, suggesting that RT should be particularly large for negative, high arousal pictures in an antisaccade task. An alternative view emphasizes approach and withdrawal behaviours. Here negative images are thought to encourage avoidance behaviours, causing faster RTs for antisaccades; whereas positive pictures encourage approach behaviours, causing faster RTs for prosaccades. Participants performed an antisaccade task in which they were presented with an image to the left or right visual field and instructed to look at or away from the image. The experimental design included five groups of images, with a factorial combination of valence (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low), and a neutral condition. In Experiments one and two the instruction was given 200 ms before the picture was presented and did not produce any effects of emotional content. Thus, if participants are given advanced notice of the upcoming saccade, the initiation of that saccade is not influenced by the emotional content of the target image. In experiments three and four, the cue was presented 200 ms after the onset of the target image. This change of SOA provided an effect of emotional content was observed in experiments three and four which was illustrated by slowed RTs for both pro- and anti-saccades. However erotic images appeared to slow down latencies across both saccades which were accompanied by high error rates.</p>


2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1061-1080 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Rayner ◽  
Gretchen Kambe ◽  
Susan A. Duffy

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Groner ◽  
Marina T. Groner ◽  
Kazuo Koga

2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan M. Preston ◽  
Michael Eden

Abstract. Music video (MV) content is frequently measured using researcher descriptions. This study examines subjective or viewers’ notions of sex and violence. 168 university students watched 9 mainstream MVs. Incidence counts of sex and violence involve more mediating factors than ratings. High incidents are associated with older viewers, higher scores for Expressivity, lower scores for Instrumentality, and with video orders beginning with high sex and violence. Ratings of sex and violence are associated with older viewers and lower scores for Instrumentality. For sex MVs, inexperienced viewers reported higher incidents and ratings. Because MVs tend to be sexier but less violent than TV and film, viewers may also use comparative media standards to evaluate emotional content MVs.


2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Géry d'Ydewalle ◽  
Wim De Bruycker

Abstract. Eye movements of children (Grade 5-6) and adults were monitored while they were watching a foreign language movie with either standard (foreign language soundtrack and native language subtitling) or reversed (foreign language subtitles and native language soundtrack) subtitling. With standard subtitling, reading behavior in the subtitle was observed, but there was a difference between one- and two-line subtitles. As two lines of text contain verbal information that cannot easily be inferred from the pictures on the screen, more regular reading occurred; a single text line is often redundant to the information in the picture, and accordingly less reading of one-line text was apparent. Reversed subtitling showed even more irregular reading patterns (e.g., more subtitles skipped, fewer fixations, longer latencies). No substantial age differences emerged, except that children took longer to shift attention to the subtitle at its onset, and showed longer fixations and shorter saccades in the text. On the whole, the results demonstrated the flexibility of the attentional system and its tuning to the several information sources available (image, soundtrack, and subtitles).


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-311
Author(s):  
José David Moreno ◽  
José A. León ◽  
Lorena A. M. Arnal ◽  
Juan Botella

Abstract. We report the results of a meta-analysis of 22 experiments comparing the eye movement data obtained from young ( Mage = 21 years) and old ( Mage = 73 years) readers. The data included six eye movement measures (mean gaze duration, mean fixation duration, total sentence reading time, mean number of fixations, mean number of regressions, and mean length of progressive saccade eye movements). Estimates were obtained of the typified mean difference, d, between the age groups in all six measures. The results showed positive combined effect size estimates in favor of the young adult group (between 0.54 and 3.66 in all measures), although the difference for the mean number of fixations was not significant. Young adults make in a systematic way, shorter gazes, fewer regressions, and shorter saccadic movements during reading than older adults, and they also read faster. The meta-analysis results confirm statistically the most common patterns observed in previous research; therefore, eye movements seem to be a useful tool to measure behavioral changes due to the aging process. Moreover, these results do not allow us to discard either of the two main hypotheses assessed for explaining the observed aging effects, namely neural degenerative problems and the adoption of compensatory strategies.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 257-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Munk ◽  
Günter Daniel Rey ◽  
Anna Katharina Diergarten ◽  
Gerhild Nieding ◽  
Wolfgang Schneider ◽  
...  

An eye tracker experiment investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-year old children’s cognitive processing of film cuts. Nine short film sequences with or without editing errors were presented to 79 children. Eye movements up to 400 ms after the targeted film cuts were measured and analyzed using a new calculation formula based on Manhattan Metrics. No age effects were found for jump cuts (i.e., small movement discontinuities in a film). However, disturbances resulting from reversed-angle shots (i.e., a switch of the left-right position of actors in successive shots) led to increased reaction times between 6- and 8-year old children, whereas children of all age groups had difficulties coping with narrative discontinuity (i.e., the canonical chronological sequence of film actions is disrupted). Furthermore, 4-year old children showed a greater number of overall eye movements than 6- and 8-year old children. This indicates that some viewing skills are developed between 4 and 6 years of age. The results of the study provide evidence of a crucial time span of knowledge acquisition for television-based media literacy between 4 and 8 years.


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