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

在过去的十年中，大量的研究集中在认知和情感之间的相互作用。认知研究人员，传统上不关心情感，经常把认知和情感视为独立的实体，现在正在记录情感、记忆和注意力之间重要的相互作用。虽然研究人员已经了解了很多关于情绪如何影响记忆的知识，但对于消极和积极的情绪状态如何影响选择性注意，我们知之甚少。该研究计划的重点将放在这些领域的交叉点上：我的研究将研究情绪如何影响选择性注意和对情绪信息的记忆。所有拟议的研究都将使用眼球追踪和记录来评估个体如何关注情绪和中性图像。精确监控和记录个体凝视的能力将使我的团队能够探索个体在每时每刻处理信息时的差异，从最初的注意力方向到随后在多个图像之间的注意力转移。我们的研究将通过几条调查线推进对情绪-注意力相互作用的理解。我们将结合对比实验诱导情绪的实验（使用积极和消极情绪诱导程序）和对比自然发生情绪的个体的实验（例如，个体在烦躁情绪的测量中得分高或低）。我们还将研究与年龄相关的情绪关注差异。在我们所有的研究中，我们将确定情绪对注意力的影响如何影响记忆。选择性注意和情感是用来优先考虑人类行为反应的两个主要大脑系统，对注意-情感相互作用及其对记忆的影响的研究，解决了基本的大脑和认知过程。眼动追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一个有价值和及时的补充。我们的研究将确定视觉注意力如何以及为什么受到观察者情感状态的影响，以及这对记忆准确性的影响，这是情绪-注意力相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.