Origins of emotion effects in language and face processing
Final Report Abstract
The learning of (new) meanings of previously unknown stimuli is one of the core abilities of higher animals. This includes that inherently non-relevant stimuli acquire increased relevance through emotional and motivational contexts, which subsequently leads to their prioritized processing. Previous research suggests that such prioritized processing shows similarities, both in behavior and in its underlying neural mechanisms, to genuinely emotionally or motivationally relevant stimuli, such as words with emotional meaning or facial expressions of emotion. Among the most intriguing findings of previous neurophysiological research is that the inherent or acquired emotional/motivational relevance of stimuli becomes effective even before full meaning activation. One prominent account that attempts to explain these very early effects is that these effects are based on associative learning mechanisms, namely the transfer of relevance to low-level sensory properties of a certain stimulus. In this project, we aimed to elucidate potential boundary conditions underlying associative learning of increased relevance and its consequences for subsequent processing of such stimuli. To this aim, we implemented an established associative learning paradigm in our studies that allowed the use of completely meaningless and arbitrary stimuli to avoid any possible bias from previous idiosyncratic experience with the stimuli. In the studies of this project, we associated constructed and meaningless letter strings with monetary outcomes and used event-related brain potentials in addition to performance indicators of learning and recognition to gain better insights of the emergence and consequences of associative learning processes. The findings from our studies show that it is possible to associate abstract stimuli with increased relevance without them acquiring full semantic meaning. These learned relevancies remain effective even after learning and influence different stages of processing.
Publications
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Role of low-level visual features of symbolic stimuli in associative learning. Conference of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Vienna, Austria
Grassi, F.; Semmelhack, E.A.; Ruge, J. & Schacht, A.
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On the dynamics of gain and loss: Electrophysiological evidence from associative learning. Biological Psychology, 180(2023, 5), 108588.
Grassi, Francesco; Semmelhack, Esther A.; Ruge, Julia & Schacht, Anne
