The role of alpha oscillations in attentional prioritization of emotional arousal

• Applicant: Dr. Valeria Bekhtereva
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442650349

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

We have shown that it is possible to study both alpha oscillations and SSVEPs simultaneously. Through careful choice of stimulation frequency, interactions between SSVEPs and alpha oscillations can be avoided. By employing advanced analysis of SSVEP power using the RESS method, we were able to cleanly separate SSVEP signals from multiple simultaneous frequencies and from alpha oscillations. We also showed that luminance is a strong potential confound in studies of the perception of emotional stimuli and their influence on brain signals. Effects of valence and arousal were attenuated by statistically controlling for luminance. Typically, researchers employ image matching process to attempt to control for these. An appropriate follow-up study would be to examine how using common methods for matching image properties statistically alter the perception of those images, and whether such matching is sufficient to effectively control for differences between stimuli. Although we anticipated that some differences between neural responses to emotional stimuli would be attributable to differences in luminance between those stimuli, we were surprised that the effects of luminance were so much greater than the effects of arousal and valence. In addition, we were surprised that arousal and valence did not appear to have significant effects on alpha power. However, some of this may be attributable to the lower than expected number of participants that we were able to recruit, as a number of effects were close to statistical significance. Unfortunately, the project suffered extreme consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. The project could only be conducted in-person, but a combination of restrictions on testing and reluctance to participate hugely reduced the number of participants and the rate at which they could be tested. In addition, the consequences of the pandemic lead directly to the departure of two key members of the project team from academia, without whose participation some aspects of the planned studies were impossible to complete.

Publications

• Emotional content overrides spatial attention. Psychophysiology, 58(8).
  Bekhtereva, Valeria; Craddock, Matt & Müller, Matthias M.