Effects Of Emotional Information Processing On Inhibition Of Return

The limitation of processing resources determines that people must select and process the rich visual environment information in life.Generally speaking,the selection of visual information is realized through two mechanisms: activation and inhibition.In the process of visual information processing,emotional information can quickly activate the visual attention system,cause attention bias and obtain processing priority.Inhibition of return(IOR)is an adaptive mechanism,which promotes the possibility of visual search for new locations by suppressing the inhibition of previously searched locations or re searching objects.So when emotional information is presented in the process of inhibition of return,will the processing of emotional information affect inhibition of return?This study investigated the effect of emotional information processing on inhibition of return through eye movement technique.This study consists of three experiments.In Experiment 1,the subjects were asked to judge the valence of the emotional face pictures in the target position by using the classic cue target paradigm.The results showed that the discrimination reaction time of effective cue position was significantly longer than that of invalid cue position,indicating that inhibition of return effect appeared stably.In order to further explore the effect of emotional information processing on inhibition of return,experiment 2 used emotional picture contrast condition to present emotional face pictures with different emotional valence in target and non target positions,excluding the influence of confusion factors of target and non target positions(such as target and non target position)The results showed that the main effect and interaction effect of emotion contrast type in response time and saccade latency were not significant,indicating that emotional information did not affect inhibition of return in the process of emotional information processing.Considering the influence of task types,Experiment 3 was different from the previous two experiments in emotional information processing related tasks,and set color discrimination tasks unrelated to emotional information processing,so that the subjects could identify the border color of face pictures with different emotional valence.The results showed that the interaction effects of emotion type and cue position on behavioral response time and saccade latency were not significant,which indicated that emotional information processing had no effect on inhibition of return,and inhibition of return was a blind mechanism.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Under the condition of different emotional valence,inhibition of return was stable.(2)Emotional information processing had no effect on inhibition of return.(3)Inhibition of return(IOR)is a very stable blind mechanism which is not interfered by emotional information.