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中;然而，关于注意力部署的传统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）。对情绪刺激的注意偏向的证据来自临床焦虑患者的工作，但这些报告经常放弃对重要区别的仔细考虑，例如反射性和自愿注意力转移，短暂和持续注意力成分，以及空间和时间注意力之间的区别。在这里，一系列的实验旨在阐明基于情绪的注意偏向的机制。例如，情绪刺激捕获时间注意力的程度将通过使用“注意瞬脱”范式来探索。注意力捕捉的内隐测量将通过空间线索任务，并通过测量反应时间和准确性，在中性和情绪刺激。将通过神经影像学得出结论。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力的情况下被处理，这意味着杏仁核的激活可能在没有注意力捕获的证据的情况下发生。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力偏差发生的功能“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.