Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Jun 17;9(2):81-91.
doi: 10.2478/v10053-008-0134-9. Print 2013.

Attentional capture by emotional faces in adolescence

Affiliations

Attentional capture by emotional faces in adolescence

Jillian Grose-Fifer et al. Adv Cogn Psychol. .

Abstract

Poor decision making during adolescence occurs most frequently when situations are emotionally charged. However, relatively few studies have measured the development of cognitive control in response to emotional stimuli in this population. This study used both affective (emotional faces) and non-affective (letter) stimuli in two different flanker tasks to assess the ability to ignore task-irrelevant but distracting information, in 25 adults and 25 adolescents. On the non-emotional (letter) flanker task, the presence of incongruent flanking letters increased the number of errors, and also slowed participants' ability to identify a central letter. Adolescents committed more errors than adults, but there were no age-related differences for the reaction time interference effect in the letter condition. Post-hoc testing revealed that age-related differences on the task were driven by the younger adolescents (11-14 years); adults and older adolescents (15-17 years) were equally accurate in the letter condition. In contrast, on the emotional face flanker task, not only were adolescents less accurate than adults but they were also more distracted by task-irrelevant fearful faces as evidenced by greater reaction time interference effects. Our findings suggest that the ability to self-regulate in adolescents, as evidenced by the ability to suppress irrelevant information on a flanker task, is more difficult when stimuli are affective in nature. The ability to ignore irrelevant flankers appears to mature earlier for non-affective stimuli than for affective stimuli.

Keywords: adolescence; affective; cognitive control; flanker task; non-affective; risk taking.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Example of a fearful incongruent stimulus.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Mean accuracy (% correct) for each stimulus category. ADOL = adolescent. CONG = congruent. INCONG = incongruent. LETT = letter.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Panel A. Mean RT (in milliseconds) for each stimulus category. Panel B. Mean RTRT interference effect (in milliseconds) for each stimulus category. ADOL = adolescent. CONG = congruent. INCONG = incongruent. LETT = letter. RT= reaction time.

References

    1. Adleman N. E., Menon V., Blasey C. M., White C. D., Warsofsky I. S., Glover G. H., et al. A developmental fMRI study of the Stroop color-word task. NeuroImage. 2002;16:61–75. - PubMed
    1. Batty M., Taylor M. J. The development of emotional face processing during childhood. Developmental Science. 2006;9:207–220. - PubMed
    1. Blakemore S.-J. The social brain in adolescence. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2008;9:267–277. - PubMed
    1. Blakemore S.-J., Choudhury S. Development of the adolescent brain: Implications for executive function and social cognition. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 2006;47:296–312. - PubMed
    1. Bunge S. A., Hazeltine E., Scanlon M. D., Rosen A. C., Gabrieli J. D. E. Dissociable contributions of prefrontal and parietal cortices to response selection. NeuroImage. 2002;17:1562–1571. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources