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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on December 5, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(8):1892-1899; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm215
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Time Course of Competition for Visual Processing Resources between Emotional Pictures and Foreground Task

Matthias M. Müller1, Søren K. Andersen1 and Andreas Keil2

1 Institut für Psychologie I, Universität Leipzig, Seeburgstr. 14-20, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany, 2 National Institute of Mental Health Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention, University of Florida, Gainsville, FL 32611, USA

Address correspondence to Matthias Müller, Institut für Psychologie I, Universität Leipzig, Seeburgstr. 14-20, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. Email: m.mueller{at}rz.uni-leipzig.de.

High-arousing emotional stimuli facilitate early visual cortex, thereby acting as strong competitors for processing resources in visual cortex. The present study used an electrophysiological approach for continuously measuring the time course of competition for processing resources in the visual pathway arising from emotionally salient but task-irrelevant input while performing a foreground target detection task. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) were recorded to rapidly flickering squares superimposed upon neutral and emotionally high-arousing pictures, and variations in SSVEP amplitude over time were calculated. As reflected in SSVEP amplitude and target detection rates, arousing emotional background pictures withdrew processing resources from the detection task compared with neutral ones for several hundred milliseconds after stimulus onset. SSVEP amplitude was found to bear a close temporal relationship with accurate target detection as a function of time after stimulus onset.

Key Words: attention • biased competition • emotion • human EEG


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