Effects of emotional states on eye movements during visual search
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1
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, School of Life Science and Technology, China
It is known that emotion influences a wide range of cognitive functions, e.g. attention. Current study measured eye movements during visual search to investigate how emotional states influences visual attention. In the study, subjects viewed happy, neutral, and sad videos to induce corresponding emotional state and conducted a visual search task. Reaction times (RT) and eye movements were measured as responses. The visual search array was composed of a target (a circle with a gap on the left or the right) and 2 distractors (circles with two gaps) and these items were evenly presented on three invisible circles with radii of 2, 4 and 8 degrees (one item on each circle). In addition, the positions of the items were randomly picked from 24 possible locations on each invisible circle. RT showed main effect of target eccentricity (2, 4, and 8 degrees) that RT increased as the target eccentricity increased. Eye movements' data did not show the main effect of emotional state and target eccentricity, but showed that mean fixation duration and amplitude of the first saccade interacted with the target eccentricity. When the target located on the circle with radius of 8 degrees, mean fixation duration was longest after watching happy videos, and shortest after watching sad videos; amplitude of the first saccade after the search array onset was bigger after watching happy videos than after watching neutral and sad videos. However, no effects were found with smaller target eccentricities (2 and 4 degrees). These results suggest that happy emotional state might encourage people begin the visual search with a large amplitude of saccade and make better use of individual fixation when the target located further, suggesting that inducing different emotional state change strategies of visual search.
Keywords:
Attention,
Eye Movements,
visual search,
emotional state,
target eccentricity
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Jin
Z and
Li
L
(2015). Effects of emotional states on eye movements during visual search.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00290
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Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Zhenlan Jin, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, School of Life Science and Technology, Chengdu, China, jinzl@uestc.edu.cn