Showing posts with label crossmodal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crossmodal. Show all posts

Friday, July 20, 2007

ARTICLE UPDATE - Behold the voice of wrath: Cross-modal modulation of visual attention by anger prosody.

Brosch T, Grandjean D, Sander D, Scherer KR.

Cognition, in press

Emotionally relevant stimuli are prioritized in human information processing. It has repeatedly been shown that selective spatial attention is modulated by the emotional content of a stimulus. Until now, studies investigating this phenomenon have only examined within-modality effects, most frequently using pictures of emotional stimuli to modulate visual attention. In this study, we used simultaneously presented utterances with emotional and neutral prosody as cues for a visually presented target in a cross-modal dot probe task. Response times towards targets were faster when they appeared at the location of the source of the emotional prosody. Our results show for the first time a cross-modal attentional modulation of visual attention by auditory affective prosody.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

ARTICLE UPDATE - Cross-modal attention capture by affective stimuli: Evidence from event-related potentials

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.