Evidence for the integration of audiovisual emotional information at the perceptual level of processing |
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| Authors: | Jari Hietanen Jukka Leppänen Marko Illi Veikko Surakka |
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| Institution: | 1. Human Information Processing Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of Tampere, Finland;2. Tampere Unit for Computer-Human Interaction, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Tampere, and Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Tampere University Hospital, Finland |
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| Abstract: | The present aim was to investigate how emotional expressions presented on an unattended channel affect the recognition of the attended emotional expressions. In Experiments 1 and 2, facial and vocal expressions were simultaneously presented as stimulus combinations. The emotions (happiness, anger, or emotional neutrality) expressed by the face and voice were either congruent or incongruent. Subjects were asked to attend either to the visual (Experiment 1) or auditory (Experiment 2) channel and recognise the emotional expression. The result showed that the ignored emotional expressions significantly affected the processing of attended signals as measured by recognition accuracy and response speed. In general, attended signals were recognised more accurately and faster in congruent than in incongruent combinations. In Experiment 3, possibility for a perceptual-level integration was eliminated by presenting the response-relevant and response-irrelevant signals separated in time. In this situation, emotional information presented on the nonattended channel ceased to affect the processing of emotional signals on the attended channel. The present results are interpreted to provide evidence for the view that facial and vocal emotional signals are integrated at the perceptual level of information processing and not at the later response-selection stages. |
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