CASE STUDY: Emotional Expressions, but Not Social Context, Modulate Attention during a Discrimination Task
A core challenge in studying social interaction and emotional processing in a controlled laboratory setting is the conflict between the need for precise measurement and the dynamic nature of real-life social behaviors. In their recent paper, “Emotional expressions, but not social context, modulate attention during a discrimination task,” Pasqualette and Kulke (2024) developed a novel paradigm to examine how social context and emotional expressions influence attention. Both gaze and brain activity were recorded simultaneously while participants viewed short videos depicting positive, negative or neutral emotions. Participants’ belief wasbmanipulated by telling them that the videos were selected either by the computer (non-social condition) or by the experimenter in the adjacent room that observed them via videochat (social condition).
The central research question revolves around understanding how emotional feedback and perceived social interaction affect both overt (eye movements) and covert (brain activity) attention during a discrimination task.
EEG, Eye Tracking, and Attention Paradigm
Eye-tracking played a crucial role in this study, serving as a direct measure of overt attention—what participants were actually looking at. Human gaze behavior is a powerful indicator of social attention, fulfilling a dual function of gathering information and signaling intent. In real-life scenarios, gaze patterns vary significantly depending on social and non-social contexts, often adhering to implicit social rules. For instance, people might avoid direct eye contact in an elevator but engage in it to establish communication.
The researchers co-registered eye-tracking with electroencephalography (EEG) to provide a comprehensive understanding of attention. While EEG measures overall brain activity, which can include both overt and covert attention, eye-tracking specifically captures the overt shifts in attention. Eye movements were recorded with an arm-mounted EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker, which can be synchronized with a wide range of EEG and other biometric recording devices.
Emotional Expression Modulates Late Attentional Processing
By analyzing saccade latency (how long it takes for eyes to move to a target) and the number of saccades made, the study aimed to determine if emotional expressions or social context influenced these immediate, observable responses.
Previous research has demonstrated that emotional stimuli can influence saccade latencies. For example, emotional faces have been shown to induce shorter saccade latencies. Additionally, the presence of direct gaze can rapidly orient attention towards faces, highlighting the reflexive nature of saccades towards social content. This study, however, found no significant effects of sociality or emotional expressions on saccade latency or the number of saccades. This suggests that in this particular paradigm, the immediate eye movements of participants were not modulated by the emotional valence of the feedback or the belief of being observed. There was a significant effect of emotional expression on the EEG measures of late attention processing in the brain (Early Posterior Negativity and Late Positive Component),
The detailed analysis of eye movements and simultaneous EEG recording provided empirical data to support the finding that while emotional expressions might modulate late attention processing in the brain, they did not affect the early, overt shifts of attention measured by eye-tracking in this specific experimental design.
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