The Modulation of Exogenous Attention on Emotional Audiovisual Integration

Although emotional audiovisual integration has been investigated previously, whether emotional audiovisual integration is affected by the spatial allocation of visual attention is currently unknown. To examine this question, a variant of the exogenous spatial cueing paradigm was adopted, in which stimuli varying by facial expressions and nonverbal affective prosody were used to express six basic emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, surprise) via a visual, an auditory, or an audiovisual modality. The emotional stimuli were preceded by an unpredictive cue that was used to attract participants’ visual attention. The results showed significantly higher accuracy and quicker response times in response to bimodal audiovisual stimuli than to unimodal visual or auditory stimuli for emotional perception under both valid and invalid cue conditions. The auditory facilitation effect was stronger than the visual facilitation effect under exogenous attention for the six emotions tested. Larger auditory enhancement was induced when the target was presented at the expected location than at the unexpected location. For emotional perception, happiness shared the biggest auditory enhancement among all six emotions. However, the influence of exogenous cueing effect on emotional perception seemed to be absent.