The Sparing Effect In The Attentional Blink Elicited By Emotional Faces In The Single And Multiple RSVP

In our daily life, people are always hoping to identify targets as quickly and validly as possible. While because of the limitation of humans’attention, we cannot always do it like that. When two targets are presented among distractors in the rapid serial visual presentation, correct identification of the first target may results in a deficit for a second target with 200-500ms. Raymond (1992) named this phenomenon as attentional blink (AB). Attentional blink is a temporal deficit of attention, so researchers hope to find out how to decrease it by studying factors influence it, and call this decreasing sparing effect.The emotional information in emotional faces makes them own stronger ability to capture attention. So, it becomes our main purpose to explore whether using emotional faces as T2 can decrease the attentional blink or not. Most of the previous studies have discussed this problem in a single series of RSVP (rapid series visual presentation), while the present study may use single RSVP and multiple RSVP two paradigms to examine the attentional blink sparing effect elicited by emotional faces. At the same time, it also compares the degree of attentional blink between emotional faces and alphabets with the same experimental procedure. The multiple RSVP paradigm manipulates the space location between two targets, it may test whether the attentional blink sparing effect elicited by emotional faces is regulated by space location. Also, we can investigate the feature of attention entirely through time and space two dimensionality.The current study described the attentional blink sparing effect elicited by emotional faces through two parts of experiments, using ERP technique which has high time resolution ratio. To analysis the pure ERPs evoked by T2, the subtracting technique was used to eliminate the overlapping resulted from rapid visual presentation. Experiment 1 was about the attentional blink sparing effect elicited by emotional faces in the single RSVP task. It included two branch experiments, alphabets as T2 and emotional faces as T2, with a view to state that emotional faces would elicit attentional blink sparing effect comparing with alphabets. Experiment 2 was about the attentional blink sparing effect elicited by emotional faces in the multiple RSVP task. It also included two branch experiments as experiment 1, with the purpose to discuss whether this sparing effect was regulated by space location.In the single RSVP task, the results showed that alphabet T2 evoked apparent attentional blink while emotional faces T2 increased the accuracy of T2 inside the attentional blink (lag3). It suggests that emotional faces can decrease attentional blink and elicit AB sparing effect. The sparing effect elicited by happy face was the strongest, fear, sad, and neutral face were the same. In the experiment of alphabet T2, the early anterior N1 the posterior P1 inside AB was the same as outside. The late P300 inside AB was smaller than outside. While in the experiment of emotional faces, the amplitudes of N1, P1, and P300 inside were the same as outside. The P300 amplitude evoked by happy face were no difference with fear. The AB sparing effect happened in the post-perception stage.In the multiple RSVP task, faces could also elicit AB sparing effect, and that this sparing effect at lag3 was not modulated by space location. Happy face was also the strongest one to decrease attentional blink. Its AB sparing effect was unacted on the space location between T1 and T2 at three lags. The identification of happy faces gave rise to an obvious lag1-sparing effect at both the same space location and different. In contrast, the identification of fear, sad, and neutral faces obviously declined at lag1 and lag7. We couldnot observe the lag1-sparing effect and the period of AB trended to be longer. The same space location between T1 and T2 increased the accuracy of alphabet T2 thus decreased attentional blink. In the same space location condiction, lagl-sparing effect was observed but the different one was not. The ERPs results of multiple RSVP was mainly consistent with the single one. In the experiment of alphabet T2, the early anterior N1 the posterior PI inside AB is the same as outside. The late P300 inside AB is smaller than outside. The late P300 inside AB is smaller than outside. The ERPs evoked at the same space location is lager than the different one. Happy faces and fear faces evoked the equal P300 amplitude.In sum, faces can elicit AB sparing effect comparing with alphabets, and the sparing effect evoked by happy face is the strongest. This AB sparing effect is modulated by the space location between two targets and the modulation is reflected in the lag1-sparing effect. When the space location between two targets is the same, all of the emotional faces show lagl-sparing effect. But only happy faces have lag1-sparing effect when the space location is different. The identification of fear, sad, and neutral faces is damaged at both lag 1 and lag7, implying that lag1-sparing effect is gone. The suppression of the late P300 reveals that the attentional blink happens in the post-perception stage.