Exploring Interactions Between Attention, Emotion, and Memory using Mood Induction Procedures

在过去的十年里，大量的研究集中在认知和情绪之间的相互作用上。认知研究人员传统上不关心情绪，通常将认知和情绪视为独立的实体，现在他们正在记录情绪、记忆和注意力之间的重要交互作用。尽管研究人员已经了解了情绪如何影响记忆，但关于消极和积极情绪状态如何影响选择性注意力的研究却少之又少。这项拟议的研究计划的重点将放在这些领域的交集上：我的研究将考察情绪如何影响对情绪信息的选择性注意和记忆。所有拟议的研究都将使用眼神跟踪和记录来评估个人如何关注情绪和中性图像。准确监控和记录个人凝视的能力将使我的团队能够在信息处理的每一时刻探索个体差异，从最初的注意力方向到随后多个图像之间的注意力转移。我们的研究将通过几条线索来促进对情绪-注意交互作用的理解。我们将包括对比实验诱导的情绪的实验(使用积极和消极的情绪诱导程序)，以及对比自然产生的情绪的不同个体的实验(例如，个人在烦躁情绪测量中得分高或低)。我们还将考察与年龄有关的情绪注意力的差异。在我们所有的研究中，我们将确定情绪对注意力的影响是如何影响记忆的。选择性注意和情绪是用于确定人类行为反应优先顺序的两个主要大脑系统，而关于注意-情绪相互作用及其对记忆影响的研究，涉及基本的大脑和认知过程。眼球跟踪方法的使用是对解决类似问题的现有行为和神经成像研究的宝贵和及时的补充。我们的研究将确定视觉注意如何以及为什么会受到观察者的情感状态的影响，以及这对记忆准确性有什么影响，这是情感-注意交互作用理论的关键问题。

During the past decade a great deal of research has focused on the interactions between cognition and emotion. Cognition researchers, traditionally unconcerned with emotion and often viewing cognition and emotion as separate entities, are now documenting important interactions between emotion, memory, and attention. Although researchers have learned a great deal about how mood can affect memory, much less is known of how negative and positive mood states affect selective attention. The focus of the proposed research program will be on the intersection of these domains: my research will examine how mood affects selective attention and memory for emotional information. All the proposed studies will use eye gaze tracking and recording to assess how individuals attend to emotional and neutral images. The ability to precisely monitor and record an individual's gaze will allow my team to explore individual differences in the moment-by-moment processing of information, from the initial orientation of attention to subsequent shifts of attention between multiple images. Our research will advance the understanding of emotion-attention interactions via several lines of inquiry. We will incorporate experiments contrasting experimentally-induced moods (using positive and negative mood induction procedures) and experiments contrasting individuals varying in naturally occurring moods (e.g., individuals scoring high or low on measures of dysphoric mood). We will also examine age-related differences in attention to emotion. In all our studies we will determine how effects of emotion on attention influence memory. Selective attention and emotion are the two main brain systems used to prioritize human behavioral responses, and research on attention-emotion interactions, and their impact on memory, addresses fundamental brain and cognitive processes. The use of eye tracking methods is a valuable and timely addition to existing behavioral and neuroimaging studies addressing similar questions. Our research will determine how and why visual attention is influenced by an observer's affective state and what impact this has on memory accuracy, key issues for theories of emotion-attention interaction.