ERP Investigation of Attentional Capture by Fearful Faces (2014)

Undergraduate: Melisa Menceloglu

Faculty Advisor: Joseph Hopfinger
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

---

An enhanced sensitivity to fearful faces is evolutionarily advantageous; however, it is unclear at what level of neural processing this bias is realized. There are conflicting results from studies investigating whether the face-specific N170 event-related potential (ERP) component is enhanced for fearful faces. Studies have also shown that task irrelevant fearful faces elicit an ERP index of attentional selection (N2pc), reflecting attentional capture by fearful faces. The present study examined how early perceptual processing related to attentional capture for fearful and neutral faces. Here, we investigated the N170 and N2pc, as well as an ERP index of attentional reorienting (the ¿IIN¿). Participants performed a modified version of the attentional cueing task, in which a pair of face images preceded the target stimulus. The ERP analyses indicated that the N170 did not differ for fearful and neutral faces, suggesting that fear did not affect this early level of visual processing. Fearful faces did not elicit an N2pc and the targets appearing at the uncued location did not elicit an IIN, suggesting that fearful faces did not capture or hold attention. Overall, these results suggest that neither early visual processing of, nor attentional orienting to faces is necessarily affected by fear.