Crowding refers to the phenomenon of increased difficulty in identifying a peripherally presented stimulus when it is surrounded by adjacent flankers compared to when it is presented in isolation. The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of flanker and target emotion on crowding effects. Therefore, Landolt rings with certain opening directions were conditioned with neutral or negative pictures. These conditioned stimuli were afterwards used in a visual crowding task, in which the critical spacing (75% threshold) was assessed for emotional flankers as well as for emotional targets. Larger crowding effects were observed for negatively relative to neutrally conditioned flankers, indicating more interference with negative flankers. Additionally, for participants showing a strong evaluative conditioning effect, smaller crowding effects were found for negatively relative to neutrally conditioned targets, indicating enhanced identification of negative target stimuli. In conclusion, crowding effects are modulated by both flanker and target emotion, suggesting that high-level stimulus features survive crowding and influence recognition performance. The study further shows that evaluative conditioning can be a useful tool to study the effect of emotion on rather early perceptual processes.

中文翻译：

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拥挤的负面条件侧翼和目标

拥挤是指当周围出现的刺激被相邻的侧翼包围时，与单独出现时相比，识别周围出现的刺激更加困难的现象。本研究的目的是调查侧翼和目标情绪对拥挤效应的影响。因此，具有特定开口方向的 Landolt 环以中性或负面图片为条件。这些条件刺激随后用于视觉拥挤任务，其中评估了情感侧翼和情感目标的临界间距（75% 阈值）。相对于中性条件的侧翼，观察到更大的拥挤效应，表明对负侧翼的干扰更大。此外，对于表现出强烈评价性条件作用的参与者，相对于中性条件的目标，消极的拥挤效应较小，表明对消极目标刺激的识别增强。总之，拥挤效应受侧翼和目标情绪的调节，表明高级刺激特征在拥挤中幸存下来并影响识别性能。该研究进一步表明，评价性条件反射可以成为研究情绪对早期知觉过程影响的有用工具。