Priming effects for affective vs. neutral faces

Affective and Neutral Tasks (faces with negative or neutral content, with different lighting and orientation) requiring reaction time judgments of poser identity were administered to 32 participants. Speed and accuracy were better for the Affective than Neutral Task, consistent with literature suggesting facilitation of performance by affective content. Priming effects were significant for the Affective but not Neutral Task. An Explicit Post-Test indicated no conscious knowledge of the stimulus frequency that was associated with performance facilitation. Faster performance by female vs. male participants, and differential speeds and susceptibility to priming of different emotions were also found. Anger and shock were responded to most rapidly and accurately in several conditions, showed no gender differences, and showed significant priming for both RT and accuracy. Fear and pain were responded to least accurately, were associated with faster female than male reaction time, and the accuracy data showed a kind of reverse priming.     

Implicit and explicit memory for affective passages in temporal lobectomy patients

Eighteen temporal lobectomy patients (9 left, LTL; 9 right, RTL) were administered four verbal tasks, an Affective Implicit Task, a Neutral Implicit Task, an Affective Explicit Task, and a Neutral Explicit Task. For the Affective and Neutral Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading aloud passages with affective or neutral content, respectively, as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that they did not understand. A target verbal passage was repeated three times; this target passage was alternated with other previously unread passages, and all passages had the same number of words. The Explicit Affective and Neutral Tasks were administered at the end of testing, and consisted of multiple choice questions regarding passage content. Verbal priming effects in terms of improved reading speed with repetition for the target but not non-target passages were found for patients with both left and right temporal lobectomies. As in the Burton, Rabin et al. [Burton, L., Rabin, L., Vardy, S.B., Frohlich, J., Wyatt, G., Dimitri, D., Constante, S., Guterman, E. (2004). Gender differences in implicit and explicit memory for affective passages. Brain and Cognition, 54(3), 218-224] normative study, there were no interactions between this priming effect and affective/neutral content. For the explicit tasks, items from the repeated passages were remembered better than the unrepeated passages, and there was a trend for information from the affective passages to be remembered better than the neutral passages, similar to the normative pattern. The RTL group did not show the normative pattern of slower reading speed for affective compared to neutral passages that the LTL group showed. Thus, the present findings support the idea that intact right medial temporal structures are important for affective content to influence some aspects of verbal processing.     

Gender differences in implicit and explicit memory for affective passages

Thirty-two participants were administered 4 verbal tasks, an Implicit Affective Task, an Implicit Neutral Task, an Explicit Affective Task, and an Explicit Neutral Task. For the Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading passages aloud as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that they did not understand. A target verbal passage was repeated three times, and alternated with other previously unread passages. The Implicit Affective and Neutral passages had strong affective or neutral content, respectively. The Explicit Tasks were administered at the end of testing, and consisted of multiple choice questions regarding the passages. Priming effects in terms of more rapid reading speed for the target compared to non-target passages were seen for both the Implicit Affective Task and the Implicit Neutral Task. Overall reading speed was faster for the passages with neutral compared to affective content, consistent with studies of the emotional Stroop effect. For the Explicit memory tasks, overall performance was better on the items from the repeated passage, and on the Affective compared to Neutral Task. The male subjects showed greater priming for affective material than female subjects, and a greater gain than female subjects in explicit memory for affective compared to neutral material.     

Progressive age-related changes in the attentional blink paradigm

Previous studies on aging and attention typically examine group differences between younger and older adults, rather than seeing aging as a continuous process. Using correlational analyses, this study examined progressive changes in the magnitude of the attentional blink (AB) associated with aging. Increased age was found to be significantly associated with the ability to detect the second target (T2), whereby older age was correlated with the production of a longer and more pronounced AB; this supports the proposition that aging is associated with reduced inhibitory processes and selective attention. It was also found that AB performance somewhat improves between ages 18-39 years, but tends to decline from 40 years of age onward, providing an interesting and novel finding that AB effects may become more sensitive at this point in time. The AB task may prove useful in the assessment of selective attention in normal healthy adults, as well as changes associated with pathological aging.