Cognitive Impact Differs from Relationship of Scene and Facial Expression

Abstract

Attentional bias for threat, which causes time delay in reaction to simple tasks in psychological trials, has been found in recent studies. In this study, scenes with different qualities for the background and eigen faces with different expressions for the foreground were chosen to examine the various reaction times of participants to shed light on the neural chronometry of cognitive bias. According to the analysis of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) were classified as background containing positive, neutral, or negative information, 5 eigen faces with positive or negative expressions were used as foreground (target). A discrimination task and a competition task were designed to test the subjects' attentional bias under contrast/correlative information. Keyboard-Press Times (KPTs) were recorded as the participants performed the tasks. Results showed that negative information could result in reaction time delay in facial expression cognition in general, and this affection not only appeared to the cognitive procession of expression, but also affected by the information from environment. The data suggest that cognitive procession to facial expression was affected not only by the main information of itself but the context within which it is perceived.