Spatial attention is our capacity to attend to or ignore particular regions of our spatial environment. However, some classes of stimuli may be able to override our efforts to ignore them. Here we assessed the relationship between involuntary attentional capture with emotional images and spatial attention at early stages of perceptual processing. Multiple scenes of unpleasant and neutral content were displayed in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams that elicited the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), a neural marker of selective attention at early visual areas. In a spatial cueing task, participants were cued to covertly attend to RSVP streams presented at 4 and 6 Hz presentation rates in the left and right visual hemifields. The task was to detect square targets occasionally displayed within the image streams, responding only to those appearing on the cued side. The RSVP streams were always neutral pictures in one visual hemifield but would unpredictably switch from neutral to aversive content in the other visual hemifield. We found that SSVEP amplitude was consistently modulated by a change in emotional valence of image streams, regardless of whether the change in content occurred in the attended or unattended spatial location, reflecting an automatic sensory amplification for affective stimuli. The present data provide further evidence in support that emotional images can attract visual processing resources independently of spatial attention allocation, and are consistent with sustained sensory facilitation of early visual areas through re-entrant feedback projections from higher-order cortical areas involved in the extraction of affective information.

中文翻译：

---

情感内容超越空间注意力

空间注意力是我们关注或忽略空间环境特定区域的能力。然而，某些类别的刺激可能会压倒我们忽略它们的努力。在这里，我们评估了在感知处理的早期阶段，非自愿注意力捕获与情绪图像和空间注意力之间的关系。多个不愉快和中性内容的场景显示在快速串行视觉呈现 (RSVP) 流中，引发稳态视觉诱发电位 (SSVEP)，这是早期视觉区域选择性注意的神经标记。在空间提示任务中，参与者被提示暗中注意左右视觉半场中以 4 和 6 Hz 呈现速率呈现的 RSVP 流。任务是检测偶尔显示在图像流中的方形目标，只回应那些出现在提示侧的人。RSVP 流在一个视觉半场中始终是中性图片，但在另一个视觉半场中会意外地从中性切换到厌恶内容。我们发现 SSVEP 幅度始终受到图像流情绪效价的变化的调节，无论内容的变化是发生在有人参与还是无人参与的空间位置，这反映了情感刺激的自动感觉放大。目前的数据提供了进一步的证据，支持情感图像可以独立于空间注意力分配吸引视觉处理资源，