Attentional Bias to Briefly Presented Emotional Distractors Follows a Slow Time Course in Visual Cortex

Attentional bias to briefly presented emotional distractors follows a slow time course in visual cortex.

A central controversy in the field of attention is how the brain deals with emotional distractors and to what extent they capture attentional processing resources reflexively due to their inherent significance for guidance of adaptive behavior and survival. Especially, the time course of competitive interactions in early visual areas and whether masking of briefly presented emotional stimuli ca...

Attentional bias to affective faces and complex IAPS images in early visual cortex follows emotional cue extraction

Emotionally arousing stimuli are known to rapidly draw the brain's processing resources, even when they are task-irrelevant. The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) response, a neural response to a flickering stimulus which effectively allows measurement of the processing resources devoted to that stimulus, has been used to examine this process of attentional shifting. Previous studies...

The Time Course of Attentional Bias to Threat and Safety

Competition Effects in Visual Cortex Between Emotional Distractors and a Primary Task in Remitted Depression.

BACKGROUND Attentional biases, particularly difficulty inhibiting attention to negative stimuli, are implicated in risk for major depressive disorder (MDD). The current study examined a neural measure of attentional bias using a continuous index of visuocortical engagement (steady-state visual evoked potentials [SSVEPs]) before and after a negative mood induction in a population at high-risk fo...

Role of frontal cortex in attentional capture by singleton distractors.

The role of frontal cortex in selective attention to visual distractors was examined in an attentional capture task in which participants searched for a unique shape in the presence or absence of an additional colour singleton distractor. The presence of the additional singleton was associated with slower behavioural responses to the shape target, and a greater neural signal in inferior frontal...