The interaction of explicit target and implicit emotion categorization

Abstract

A large number of studies showed that emotional scenes grab attention due to the significance depicted in the image. In addition, attention can be directed voluntarily towards higher order stimulus categories defined by semantic content. Here, we raise the question of what happens in the brain when these two processes interact. Specifically, in one condition, participants (N 5 24) had to indicate whether a natural scene presented in the center of the screen contained an animal or not while pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures were concurrently presented in the background. In a control condition, the same stimuli were passively viewed. Pictures were presented for 24 ms while ERPs (256 channels) were recorded. Results replicate previous findings that emotional picture processing is associated with increased EPN and LPP components compared to neutral pictures during passive viewing. In contrast, while performing the higher-order semantic categorization task, emotional modulation was significantly attenuated, even when only considering high-arousing stimulus materials. These results show that explicit target and implicit emotion categorization compete for shared processing resources.