Thank you for downloading an introduction to the event related potential technique. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have look hundreds times for their favorite readings like this an introduction to the event related potential technique, but end up in malicious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they are facing with some malicious bugs inside their laptop.

An Introduction To The Event Related Potential Technique

Best practices in eye tracking research

For social animals, attending to and recognizing the emotional expressions of other individuals is of crucial importance for their survival and likely has a deep evolutionary origin. Gaining insight into how emotional expressions evolved as adaptations over the course of evolution can be achieved by making direct cross-species comparisons. To that extent, experimental paradigms that are suitable for investigating emotional processing across species need to be developed and evaluated. The emotional dot-probe task, which measures attention allocation toward emotional stimuli, has this potential. The task is implicit, and subjects need minimal training to perform the task successfully. Findings in nonhuman primates, although scarce, show that they, like humans, have an attentional bias toward emotional stimuli. However, the wide literature on human studies has shown that different factors can have important moderating effects on the results. Due to the large heterogeneity of this literature, these moderating effects often remain unnoticed. We here review this literature and show that subject characteristics and differences in experimental designs affect the results of the dot-probe task. We conclude with specific recommendations regarding these issues that are particularly relevant to take into consideration when applying this paradigm to study animals.

/pdf/the-dot-probe-task-to-measure-emotional-attention-a-suitable-2whjtj1tv1.pdf

The dot-probe task to measure emotional attention: A suitable measure in comparative studies?

Extracting the temporal structure of sequences of events is crucial for perception, decision-making, and language processing. Here, we investigate the mechanisms by which the brain acquires knowledge of sequences and the possibility that successive brain responses reflect the progressive extraction of sequence statistics at different timescales. We measured brain activity using magnetoencephalography in humans exposed to auditory sequences with various statistical regularities, and we modeled this activity as theoretical surprise levels using several learning models. Successive brain waves related to different types of statistical inferences. Early post-stimulus brain waves denoted a sensitivity to a simple statistic, the frequency of items estimated over a long timescale (habituation). Mid-latency and late brain waves conformed qualitatively and quantitatively to the computational properties of a more complex inference: the learning of recent transition probabilities. Our findings thus support the existence of multiple computational systems for sequence processing involving statistical inferences at multiple scales.

Brain signatures of a multiscale process of sequence learning in humans.

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology

The color red is known to influence psychological functioning, having both negative (e.g., blood, fire, danger), and positive (e.g., sex, food) connotations. The aim of our study was to assess the attentional capture by red-colored images, and to explore the modulatory role of the emotional valence in this process, as postulated by Elliot and Maier's (2012) color-in-context theory. Participants completed a dot-probe task with each cue comprising two images of equal valence and arousal, one containing a prominent red object and the other an object of different coloration. Reaction times were measured, as well as the event-related lateralizations of the EEG. Modulation of the lateralized components revealed that the color red captured and later holded the attention in both positive and negative conditions, but not in a neutral condition. An overt motor response to the target stimulus was affected mainly by attention lingering over the visual field where the red cue had been flashed. However, a weak influence of the valence could still be detected in reaction times. Therefore, red seems to guide attention, specifically in emotionally-valenced circumstances, indicating that an emotional context can alter color's impact both on attention and motor behavior.

/pdf/the-color-red-attracts-attention-in-an-emotional-context-an-czr3k9o55c.pdf

The color red attracts attention in an emotional context. An ERP study

Emotional images are processed in a prioritized manner, attracting attention almost immediately. In the present study we used eye tracking to reveal what type of features within neutral, positive, and negative images attract early visual attention: semantics, visual saliency, or their interaction. Semantic regions of interest were selected by observers, while visual saliency was determined using the Graph-Based Visual Saliency model. Images were transformed by adding pink noise in several proportions to be presented in a sequence of increasing and decreasing clarity. Locations of the first two fixations were analyzed. The results showed dominance of semantic features over visual saliency in attracting attention. This dominance was linearly related to the signal-to-noise ratio. Semantic regions were fixated more often in emotional images than in neutral ones, if signal-to-noise ratio was high enough to allow participants to comprehend the gist of a scene. Visual saliency on its own did not attract attention above chance, even in the case of pure noise images. Regions both visually salient and semantically relevant attracted a similar amount of fixation compared to semantic regions alone, or even more in the case of neutral pictures. Results provide evidence for fast and robust detection of semantically relevant features.

Emotional content of an image attracts attention more than visually salient features in various signal-to-noise ratio conditions.

Temporal and spatial characteristics of fixations are affected by image properties, including high-level scene characteristics, such as object-background composition, and low-level physical characteristics, such as image clarity. The influence of these factors is modulated by the emotional content of an image. Here, we aimed to establish whether brain correlates of fixations reflect these modulatory effects. To this end, we simultaneously scanned participants and measured their eye movements, while presenting negative and neutral images in various image clarity conditions, with controlled object-background composition. The fMRI data were analyzed using a novel fixation-based event-related (FIBER) method, which allows the tracking of brain activity linked to individual fixations. The results revealed that fixating an emotional object was linked to greater deactivation in the right lingual gyrus than fixating the background of an emotional image, while no difference between object and background was found for neutral images. We suggest that deactivation in the lingual gyrus might be linked to inhibition of saccade execution. This was supported by fixation duration results, which showed that in the negative condition, fixations falling on the object were longer than those falling on the background. Furthermore, increase in the image clarity was correlated with fixation-related activity within the lateral occipital complex, the structure linked to object recognition. This correlation was significantly stronger for negative images, presumably due to greater deployment of attention towards emotional objects. Our eye-tracking results are in line with these observations, showing that the chance of fixating an object rose faster for negative images over neutral ones as the level of noise decreased. Overall, our study demonstrated that emotional value of an image changes the way that low and high-level scene properties affect the characteristics of fixations. The fixation-related brain activity is affected by the low-level scene properties and this impact differs between negative and neutral images. The high-level scene properties also affect brain correlates of fixations, but only in the case of the negative images.

/pdf/effects-of-scene-properties-and-emotional-valence-on-brain-akqinepa4n.pdf

Effects of Scene Properties and Emotional Valence on Brain Activations: A Fixation-Related fMRI Study

Phase of the menstrual cycle affects engagement of attention with emotional images.

Processing of emotional visual information engages cognitive functions and induces arousal. We aimed to examine the modulatory role of emotional valence on brain activations linked to the processing of visual information and those linked to arousal. Participants were scanned and their pupil size was measured while viewing negative and neutral images. The visual noise was added to the images in various proportions to parametrically manipulate the amount of visual information. Pupil size was used as an index of physiological arousal. We show that arousal induced by the negative images, as compared to the neutral ones, is primarily related to greater amygdala activity while increasing visibility of negative content to enhanced activity in the lateral occipital complex (LOC). We argue that more intense visual processing of negative scenes can occur irrespective of the level of arousal. It may suggest that higher areas of the visual stream are fine-tuned to process emotionally relevant objects. Both arousal and processing of emotional visual information modulated activity within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Overlapping activations within the vmPFC may reflect the integration of these aspects of emotional processing. Additionally, we show that emotionally-evoked pupil dilations are related to activations in the amygdala, vmPFC, and LOC.

/pdf/disentangling-brain-activity-related-to-the-processing-of-js5lo0ke5q.pdf

Joanna Pilarczyk

Papers

The color red attracts attention in an emotional context. An ERP study

Emotional content of an image attracts attention more than visually salient features in various signal-to-noise ratio conditions.

Effects of Scene Properties and Emotional Valence on Brain Activations: A Fixation-Related fMRI Study

Phase of the menstrual cycle affects engagement of attention with emotional images.

Disentangling brain activity related to the processing of emotional visual information and emotional arousal.