•  
  •  
 

PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGS: EMOTION & ANIMACY IN SCENE PERCEPTION

Abstract

Animate and inanimate conceptual categories represent domain-specific knowledge systems that are subserved by partially distinct neural mechanisms. Recent work suggests that the early posterior negativity (EPN) is sensitive to animacy. Here we test the impact of scene animacy and emotion on ratings of valence and arousal, as well as modulation of the EPN and the late positive potential (LPP). Participants (n=77) viewed 180 scenes of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant people, objects and landscapes, balanced for luminance and complexity. People scenes excluded erotica & mutilations, in an effort to balance arousal ratings across all scenes. EEG data were recorded from 128 channels and converted into baseline-deviated ERP epochs from each participant and scene category. All scene contents evoked the expected patterns of valence and arousal ratings. However, emotional people and object scenes were rated as significantly more arousing than landscapes. LPP modulation followed the arousal ratings, with the greatest positivity for emotional people scenes, followed closely by emotional object scenes, while emotional landscapes did not modulate the LPP. Modulation of the EPN showed a similar pattern, with pleasant people and pleasant objects prompting the greatest negativity, a pattern that remained in a subset of people and object scenes that were closely matched for rated arousal. The EPN was not enhanced by pleasant, relative to neutral landscapes. Thus, scene content interacts with emotional modulation of the EPN and LPP. Specifically, pleasant and unpleasant landscapes, despite strong valence ratings and reliably enhanced arousal ratings, did not evoke differential ERPs relative to neutral landscapes. In contrast, highly arousing emotional objects are capable of modulating the LPP to a similar extent as moderately arousing emotional people.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS