AUTHOR=Zhou Xing , Du Bixuan , Wei Zhiqing , He Weiqi TITLE=Attention Capture of Non-target Emotional Faces: An Evidence From Reward Learning JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=10 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03004 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03004 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

The aim of this study was to explore whether reward learning would affect the processing of targets when an emotional stimulus was task irrelevant. In the current study, using a visual search paradigm to establish an association between emotional faces and reward, an emotional face appeared as a task-irrelevant distractor during the test after reward learning, and participants were asked to judge the orientation of a line on the face. In experiment 1, no significant difference was found between the high reward-fear distractor condition and the no reward-neutral condition, but the response times of the high reward-fear condition were significantly longer than those of the low reward-happy condition. In experiment 2, there was no significant difference in participants’ performance between high reward-happy and no reward-neutral responses. In addition, response times of the low reward-fear condition wear significantly longer than those of the high reward-happy and no reward-neutral conditions. The results show that reward learning affects attention bias of task-irrelevant emotional faces even when reward is absent. Moreover, the high reward selection history is more effective in weakening the emotional advantage of the processing advantage than the low reward.