The role of imagery in threat-related perceptual decision making

Abstract

Visual perception is heavily influenced by "top-down" factors, including goals, expectations, and prior knowledge about the environmental context. Recent research has demonstrated the beneficial role threat-related cues play in perceptual decision making; however, the psychological processes contributing to this differential effect remain unclear. Since visual imagery helps to create perceptual representations or "templates" based on prior knowledge (e.g., cues), the present study examines the role vividness of visual imagery plays in enhanced perceptual decision making following threatening cues. In a perceptual decision-making task, participants used threat-related and neutral cues to detect perceptually degraded fearful and neutral faces presented at predetermined perceptual thresholds. Participants' vividness of imagery was measured by the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire-2 (VVIQ-2). Our results replicated prior work demonstrating that threat cues improve accuracy, perceptual sensitivity, and speed of perceptual decision making compared to neutral cues. Furthermore, better performance following threat and neutral cues was associated with higher VVIQ-2 scores. Importantly, more precise and rapid perceptual decision making following threatening cues was associated with greater VVIQ-2 scores, even after controlling for performance related to neutral cues. This association may be because greater imagery ability allows one to conjure more vivid threat-related templates, which facilitate subsequent perception. While the detection of threatening stimuli is well studied in the literature, our findings elucidate how threatening cues occurring prior to the stimulus aid in subsequent perception. Overall, these findings highlight the necessity of considering top-down threat-related factors in visual perceptual decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1.

Upper panel: A. Timeline of the threshold task. Perceptual thresholds, 75% correct, were found for fearful and neutral faces. B. Adaptive staircases, which made images harder or easier to see based on subject responses, were used in the threshold task to find each participant’s threshold for fearful and neutral faces. C. Cue and stimulus pairs used in the cued task: fear cue/fearful face (FC/FF), neutral cue/fearful face (NC/FF), fear cue/neutral face (FC/NF), and neutral cue/neutral face (NC/NF). D. Timeline of cue task. Participants used cues to respond to a perceptually degraded fearful or neutral face. Lower Panel: Compared to neutral cues, threatening cues led to improvement in E. d-Prime, F. accuracy, and G. Reaction time Faces used in this figure are from the NimStim Face Stimulus Set (Tottenham et al., 2009), a publically available set of emotional face stimuli. The models pictured above have consented to having images of their faces published in scientific journals.

Figure 2.

Scatterplots displaying correlations between vividness of imagery (VVIQ-2) scores and behavioral performance measures showing greater VVIQ-2 was associated with A. increased accuracy for fear cues (FC),B. increased accuracy for neutral cues (NC), C. improved d-prime for FC, D. improved d-prime for NC, E. faster reaction time (RT) for FC, F. a trending but nonsignificant negative relationship with RT for NC.