The Relationship Of Inhibition Of Return And Emotional Attention Bias: Evidence From Eye Movement Using Emotion Pictures

Our visual environment is prodigiously rich and our processing capacities regrettably limited. So, wo need to select information for elaborate processing and access consciousness. Which factors or mechanisms impact our choice of visual information? Moreover, what the relationship between the different mechanisms is? The study of these problems will give us a better understanding of the interaction process between humans and the environment.In a general way, we select information by using activation or inhibition mechanisms, in fact, these mechanisms always work at the same time. Emotional clues have extensive social and biological significance, these salient stimulis are in general particularly prone to capture attention and acquire priority for processing. The inhibition of return is a kind of adaptive mechanism which could increase the chances for the new positions by inhibiting re-inspection of positions or objects have been searched previously. This inhibition would be associated with impaired perceptual processes, affecting the detection of stimuli appearing at cued locations. As we know, Emotional clues prone to capture attention, evoking attention bias. Then, what will be happen if emotional stimulis present in the cued position, the processing of emotional information whether could override or decrease the influnce of the inhibitional label? By appling of eye movement technology, this research explored the relationship between inhibition of return and emotional attention bias through two experiments:condition of task-related and condition of task-unrelated. The conclusions were as follows:(1) The effect of inhibition of return appears stablely under the different conditions.(2) Under the task-related condition, compared with neutral pictures, for the emotional images, there are shorter first saccade latency, longer fixation duration time, larger time proportion, more fixation points and larger points proportion. Illustrates that emotional clues evoke attention bias by capturing visual attention faster and difficultly disengaging. Under the task-unrelated condition, emotional cues could not capture visual attention quickly, but still have longer time on them, those result shows that individuals have a attention bias toward emotional clues, but the correlation of emotional clues and experiment task modulates the attention capture to emotional im ages.(3) The mechanism of inhibition of return is blind, impairing perceptual processes and affecting the detection of stimuli appearing at cued locations. But under the task-unrelated condition, the suppression of processing of emotional information is limited, reflecting the automatic processing tendency of emotional information.