Attentional Guidance by Emotional Salience

描述（由申请人提供）：人类生活在一个充满情感意义的世界；然而，传统的注意力部署研究在很大程度上依赖于无意义刺激的呈现（例如，突然发作和独特的颜色）。注意偏向于情绪刺激的证据来自于临床焦虑患者的研究，但这些报告经常忽略了重要的区别，如反射性和自愿性注意转移、短暂性和持续性注意成分、空间和时间注意之间的区别。在这里，一系列的实验旨在阐明基于情绪的注意偏见的机制。例如，情绪刺激捕获时间注意的程度将通过使用“注意眨眼”范式来探索。注意捕获的内隐测量将通过空间提示任务，以及通过测量对中性和情绪刺激的反应时间和准确性来获得。结论将由神经影像学得出。例如，丘脑-杏仁核的直接联系表明，情绪刺激可能在没有注意的情况下被处理，正如杏仁核在没有注意捕获证据的情况下激活所暗示的那样。此外，忽视情绪刺激的困难应该反映在前扣带皮层的激活上。这项研究将有助于揭示基于情绪的注意偏差产生的功能“解剖学”。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Humans live in a world laden with affective meaning; yet, traditional research on attentional deployment relies largely on the presentation of meaningless stimuli (e.g., sudden onsets and unique colors). Evidence for attentional biases to emotional stimuli comes from work with clinically anxious patients, but these reports have frequently forgone careful consideration of important distinctions, such as those between reflexive and voluntary attention shifts, transient and sustained attention components, and spatial and temporal attention. Here, a range of experiments is designed to elucidate the mechanisms underlying emotion-based attentional biases. For example, the degree to which emotional stimuli capture temporal attention will be explored through the use of an "attentional blink" paradigm. Implicit measures of attention capture will be obtained through spatial cueing tasks, and by measuring reaction times and accuracy in response to neutral and emotional stimuli. Conclusions will be informed by neuroimaging. For example, direct thalamic-amygdala connections suggest that emotional stimuli may be processed without attention, as would be implied should amygdala activation occur without evidence for attention capture. Also, difficulty in ignoring emotional stimuli should be reflected in anterior cingulate cortex activation. This research will help to lay bare the functional "anatomy" by which emotion-based attentional biases occur.