Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Psychology

Western Kentucky University

Aging

2015

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Age Differences In The Impact Of Emotional Cues On Subsequent Target Detection, Brandon Wade Coffey Jul 2015

Age Differences In The Impact Of Emotional Cues On Subsequent Target Detection, Brandon Wade Coffey

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Emotional cues within the environment capture our attention and influence how we perceive our surroundings. Past research has shown that emotional cues presented before the detection of a perceptual gap can actually impair the perception of elementary visual features (e.g., the lack of detail creating a spatial gap) while simultaneously improving the perception of fast temporal features of vision (e.g., the rapid onset, offset, and re-emergence of a stimulus). This effect has been attributed to amygdalar enhancements of visual inputs conveying emotional features along magnocellular channels. The current study compared participants’ ability to detect spatial and temporal gaps in simple …


The Effects Of Age And Task On Visual Emotion Processing, Nicole Elaine Chambers May 2015

The Effects Of Age And Task On Visual Emotion Processing, Nicole Elaine Chambers

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Younger adults’ perception of and attention to facial stimuli are enhanced by positive and negative emotional expressions, with negativity leading to a greater benefit than positivity. Conversely, older adults demonstrate a positivity bias, devoting more attention to positive stimuli and less to negative. It is unclear if age differences in these attentional preferences emerge due to differences in how their perceptual systems respond to positive and negative stimuli. Emotional facial expressions elicit enhanced P1 and N170 components of visually-evoked event-related potentials (ERP) over posterior scalp regions associated with vision. The current study examined the extent to which angry and happy …