Emotional facial expressions capture attention
- 23 January 2001
- journal article
- Published by Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health) in Neurology
- Vol. 56 (2), 153-158
- https://doi.org/10.1212/wnl.56.2.153
Abstract
Objective: To determine whether the emotional significance of stimuli can influence spatial attention. Background: Motivational and emotional factors may affect attention toward stimuli. However, this has never been examined in brain-damaged patients who present with unilateral inattention due to left spatial neglect. Methods: The authors studied three patients with chronic left neglect and visual extinction after right parietal stroke. Shapes or faces with neutral, happy, or angry expressions were briefly presented in the right, left, or both visual fields. On unilateral trials, the patients detected all stimuli equally on both sides. On bilateral trials, they extinguished faces in the contralesional field much less often than shapes, and faces with happy or angry facial expressions much less than faces with a neutral expression. Conclusion: Facial features and emotional expressions can be analyzed despite lying on the unattended side, and may influence the spatial distribution of attention. These findings support the view that attention is controlled by neural mechanisms involving not only frontoparietal areas but also limbic components in cingulate cortex and amygdala, which may interact with ventral visual areas in the temporal lobe to detect affective value and prioritize attention to salient stimuli.Keywords
This publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit:
- Computer-enhanced emotion in facial expressionsProceedings Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 1997
- Attentional Biases for Emotional FacesCognition and Emotion, 1997
- Grouping and Extinction: Evidence for Low-level Modulation of Visual SelectionCognitive Neuropsychology, 1996
- Preattentive analysis of facial expressions of emotionCognition and Emotion, 1995
- Facial organization blocks access to low-level features: An object inferiority effect.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1995
- Facial organization blocks access to low-level features: An object inferiority effect.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1995
- NeglectCurrent Opinion in Neurobiology, 1994
- Faces and Facial Expressions do not Pop OutPerception, 1993
- Finding the face in the crowd: An anger superiority effect.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1988
- The 5-month-old's ability to discriminate facial expressions of emotionInfant Behavior and Development, 1985