Keil, Andreas; Bradley, Margaret M.; Junghöfer, Markus; Russmann, Thomas; Lowenthal, William; Lang, Peter J.
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, 18-24.
The P3 component of the event-related potential (ERP) to an acoustic startle probe is modulated during picture viewing, with reduced P3 amplitude when participants view either pleasant or unpleasant, as opposed to neutral, pictures. We have interpreted this as reflecting capture of attentional resources by affective pictures, with fewer resources available for processing the secondary startle probe. In the present study, we tested this resource allocation hypothesis by presenting either pictures or sounds as foreground stimuli, with the prediction that P3 amplitude in response to secondary startle probes would be reduced for affectively engaging foregrounds regardless of modality. Using dense-array electroencephalography and a source estimation procedure, we observed that P3 amplitude was indeed smaller when startle probes were presented during emotional, as opposed to neutral, stimuli for both sound and picture foregrounds. Source modeling indicated a common frontocentral maximum of P3 modulation by affect. The data support the notion that emotionally arousing stimuli transmodally attract resources, leading to optimized processing of the affective stimuli at the cost of the processing of concurrent stimuli.
2 comments:
I just discovered your blog and I must say I'm impressed. Congratulations for dedicating so much time on compiling all these article updates. I am also a Phd student at the University of Barcelona. My lab is specialized in attention and ERPs but my research interests focus on emotion-attention interaction. I have a question: do you know by any chance how I can get the full text of this article you mentioned by Keil et al.? I couldn't find any link to the pdf on Pubmed or ISIweb. This paper would be very interesting for me since I happened to find opposite effects with a similar paradigm, both with fMRI and ERP techniques and I suppose their results are quite robust (they replicate many previous studies). Thank you in advance and greetings from Barcelona. Judith
Hi Judith,
Thanks for your comment. I can send the article to you. Can you just
e-mail me your e-mail address to the e-mail listed on the right hand
side? I guess we're using different tasks that look into the same
issue. We should catch up some times.
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