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
. 2023 Dec 21:14:1297192.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1297192. eCollection 2023.

Delayed ocular disengagement from arousing scenes

Andrea De Cesarei  1 , Nicola Sambuco  1 , Stefania D'Ascenzo  2 , Roberto Nicoletti  2 , Maurizio Codispoti  1
Affiliations

Delayed ocular disengagement from arousing scenes

Andrea De Cesarei et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Visual exploration of the world is supported by eye movements which can be speeded up or delayed depending on bottom-up stimulation, top-down goals, and prior associations. Previous studies observed faster initiation of saccades toward emotional than neutral natural scenes; however, less is known concerning saccades which originate from emotional, compared with neutral, scenes. Here, we addressed this issue by examining a task in which participants continuously moved their gaze from and toward pictures (natural scenes), which could be emotional or neutral, and changed position in every trial. Saccades were initiated later when the starting picture was emotional compared to neutral, and this slowing was associated with the arousal value of the picture, suggesting that ocular disengagement does not vary with stimulus valence but is affected by engaging picture contents such as erotica and threat/injuries.

Keywords: arousal; disengagement; emotion; eye movements; negative bias.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.; The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Procedure and design details. In each trial, a pattern of four images was presented, three of which consisted in a phase-scrambled image and one in a greyscale picture. Participants had to gaze at the picture as soon as it appeared; after a 1 s exposure time, the picture disappeared and was replaced by a 150 ms gap. After this short gap, the next pattern was presented, and participants had to gaze at the newly appeared picture. Trials were coded according to the valence of the starting and the ending point of the saccade; in the example on the upper right, the trial was coded as going from neutral to emotional. In the experimental design each of the four positions could either represent a neutral or an emotional image (random condition) or be associated with exclusively one emotional valence (hemifield condition).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Affective modulation of saccadic latency. Left: effects of emotionality (emotional vs. neutral) of the starting and landing picture on saccadic latency. Right: effects of affective category on ocular disengagement. Error bars represent within-participant standard errors (Cousineau, 2005).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Awh E., Belopolsky A. V., Theeuwes J. (2012). Top-down versus bottom-up attentional control: a failed theoretical dichotomy. Trends Cogn. Sci. 16, 437–443. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.06.010, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Baumeister R. F., Bratslavsky E., Finkenauer C., Vohs K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Rev. Gen. Psychol. 5, 323–370. doi: 10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323 - DOI
    1. Belopolsky A. V. (2015). Common priority map for selection history, reward and emotion in the oculomotor system. Perception 44, 920–933. doi: 10.1177/0301006615596866 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Belopolsky A. V., Devue C., Theeuwes J. (2011). Angry faces hold the eyes. Vis. Cogn. 19, 27–36. doi: 10.1080/13506285.2010.536186 - DOI
    1. Boettcher S. E. P., Shalev N., Wolfe J. M., Nobre A. C. (2022). Right place, right time: spatiotemporal predictions guide attention in dynamic visual search. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 151, 348–362. doi: 10.1037/xge0000901 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources